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Tried a one word prompt at my library write in and got 14 pages of angry farmer poems
Last Thursday I went to a write in at the Roanoke library and the host handed out index cards with a single word on each one for a warmup. Mine said "silo" and I figured I would bang out three or four lines and be done. Instead I wrote 14 pages about a farmer who is mad at his brother, his tractor, and the weather, all in first person, and I read the first page out loud because the group made me. A lady named Carol in the back row laughed so hard she had to leave the room, and two other people asked me if I actually grew up on a farm, which I did not, I grew up in a townhouse near a Chipotle. The weird part is the one word worked way better than the usual prompts I see, like "write about a door" or "describe a smell," because it gave me a single object and let my brain do whatever it wanted with it. Now I keep a stack of index cards on my desk with random nouns and I pull one whenever I get stuck. Has anyone else tried single word prompts, and if so what is your go to word when nothing is coming out?
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martin.vera27d ago
Single word prompts are overrated, I need at least a sentence to get going.
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