By Courtney Felle
The best way to learn new writing skills is to read others’ work and see what techniques you love, and the best way to appreciate reading others’ work is to try your hand at writing your own and seeing exactly how difficult those techniques are. Writing is constant exchange, push and pull between styles. With that in mind, we have a collection of prompts, spanning poetry, short story, and other genres, that include reading recommendations and examples alongside them: 1. Write your own fairytale, whether it’s significantly reimagining one that already exists or using the genre to establish an entirely new one. This could take the form of a poem, like Carol Ann Duffy’s “Little Red Cap.” It could take the form of a short story, like Molly Gutman’s “Magenta” or Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.” If you want to challenge yourself, it can also become autobiographical, as a personal essay or as a song, like Florence + The Machine’s “Blinding.” 2. Write a modernized version of a classical myth. For poetry, see Margaret Atwood’s “Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing.” For prose, see Ye Eun Cho’s “The Year of the Tiger” (in our fourth issue!). 3. Write a short story that exposes the pervasive, underlying sexism that saturates our society. Good examples include Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” and Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person.” 4. Write an ekphrastic poem based off a piece of contemporary art that preserves elements of classical poetry and art. For inspiration, see Steffi Che’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” or Richard Siken’s “Three Proofs.” 5. Write a poem in which you cover or erase a page of pre-existing text. Bonus points if you mix words and art like Jessica Goodfellow’s “The Wide Net” or Joy Merritt Krystosek’s “My First Solo.” 6. Write a poem in the form of a collage. This is especially good for satire, like Jessy Randall’s “David Foster Wallace Cut & Paste Poem #1.” 7. Write a poem based after a song, like Logan February’s “Sober II (Melodrama)” or Stephanie Chang’s “Nobody (2002).” 8. Write a poem comprised entirely of questions, like Erika Walsh’s “Lana del rey asks for space.” 9. Write a poem as a computer program, like Jason Sears’s “The Gusting Winds,” or as a math problem, like Yongyu Chen’s “Problems With Two or More Variables and Too Many Equal Signs.” 10. Write a poem that keeps beginning again, like torrin a. greathouse’s “Self-portrait as Daedalus, Writing the First Draft of His Autobiography,” or that keeps redefining an object or event, like fargo tbakhi’s “When Palestinian Children Die I Swear to You They Become” or Lana Pochiro’s “What You Think is a Serving of Rice.” 11. Write a poem that keeps redefining “girl,” like Emily Corwin’s “girl/creature” or Taryn Pire’s “Love Letter to My Lost Skins.” 12. Write a personal essay in the form of a list, like Kristin Chang’s “Detainees May Receive.” 13. Write a poem as an address to someone else, like Jason Harris’s “To the White Boys Who Sang Suwoop as We Passed on a PWI,” or to yourself, like Ocean Vuong’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong.” 14. Write a split poem in which the two halves mirror, expand upon, and contradict each other, like (our previous contributor!) Vivian Parkin DeRosa’s “When the Unborn Are Prioritized Over Suffering Refugee Children” or Adrienne Novy’s “I. This Song is Called Medicine” and “II. Who Wants to Live Forever?” 15. Write a poem where the title actively leads into the first line. The title could serve as only an entrance, like Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s “Though Odysseus was gone for 20 years my sister was gone for 9,” or as the main force of the poem, like in John LaPine’s “In Which President Trump Has Ordered the Detainment of Nearly 2000 Young Boys, Separated Them from Their Families, & Housed Them in Temporary Confinement Facilities Located Inside a Former Wal-Mart, & Attorney General Jeff Sessions Uses the Bible as Justification for Upholding the Law, & I Am on a Road Trip with My Parents & We Stop at a Gas Station in Wisconsin for Lunch & I Am Trying the New Bourbon Barbecue Bacon Brisket Sandwich from Arby’s with a Side of Small Curly Fries & a Diet Dr. Pepper.” Hopefully, with these thoughts and recommendations, you can find new ways to keep developing how you read, write, and engage with literature at large (and, if any beautiful pieces emerge, send them to us)!
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