This Week’s Tweeted Writing Prompts (October 19-25)

Each day, we tweet writing prompts to help writers get out of their shell for the creative process. Follow us on twitter (@TSHighSociety) to be inspired daily, or subscribe to the blog to get a digest of the prompts every Sunday!  

Poetry Writing Prompts

• Sunday: Think of a street intersection in your hometown. What happens–or doesn’t happen–there?
• Monday–Write a poem with only dashes as punctuation–see remarks on Emily Dickinson’s poetry–
  • “What is now known as Dickinson’s characteristic ‘dash’ is actually a richer variety of pen markings that have no typographical correspondents. Dashes are either long or short; sometimes vertical, as if to indicate musical phrasing, and often elongated periods, as if to indicate a slightly different kind of pause.” Read more here.
• Tuesday: Write your timeline in reverse, starting with your own imagined death (or after).
• Wednesday: Rewrite a contemporary historical moment as a ballad. See “Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall.
• Thursday: Write an epistolary poem–a letter–to an inanimate object/place. For inspiration, read David Roderick’s “Dear Suburb” from his new collection, The Americans. 
• Friday: Write about daily rituals–secret, mundane or grandiose, yours or someone else’s.
• Saturday: Extinction poems: Write three tercets about three extinct things (anything is fair game, from Dodos to dinosaurs, continents to clothes of another era).

Fiction Writing Prompts

• Sunday: Write a scene in which a group of people meets up for a pumpkin-carving party. 500 words.
• Monday: Write a scene before or after two people who are driving along a highway miss their exit. 300 words.
• Tuesday: Select a song, have it playing on the “jukebox” during a dialogue between two characters.
• Wednesday: Write a paragraph–in 1st person plural (we)–of being on a crowded bus and witnessing a conflict between the bus driver and a passenger.
• Thursday: Write a paragraph introducing a character who has a code name.
• Friday: Develop a primary character only through the gossip between 2-3 other characters. 301 words.
• Saturday: Your character is setting up a profile on an online dating site. What do they write in their profile introduction? One paragraph.
  

  Inspiration for Monday’s prompt.

How did it go this week?  Which prompt was most generative?  We’d love to know! Tell us in the comments below.

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