Writing and Healing Prompts
Like many of these rooms, writing and healing prompts needs a bit of housekeeping attention. I initially started out, years ago, numbering prompts—and then at some point I stopped numbering. Keep the numbering? Let it go? Organize the writing prompts by category?
The first 44 prompts I posted were numbered and are listed here with links.
Below these are the newer ones—not numbered.
1. Designing a Healing Retreat
2. Freewriting
3. The Body as a Healing Place
4. The Easiest Writing and Healing Exercise Ever
6. Discovering Needs and Desires
7. Has Writing Ever Changed Your Life?
8. Buy a Box
10. Conjuring New Images and Metaphors for Healing
11. A Scavenger Hunt
12. Falling Apart
13. Lifelines
16. A Walk on a Strange Street
17. Steps for Making a Written Collage
19. The Good Part in Other People’s Stories
20. Finding a Benefit in Adversity
21. Meanwhile
22. Once Upon a Time
23. What If the Moon’s a Balloon?
24. Deciding Who to Bring on the Train
25. A Memo at Your Breakfast Plate
26. Figuring Out Where One Is on the Map
27. What Am I Here For? (part one) // What Am I Here For? (part two)
28. Consulting with the Wizard of Oz
31. Writing a Letter of Resignation
32. Keeping a Process Journal: A Long-Term Solution to Writer’s Block
33. Imagining Refuge
34. The Next Step
35. My Favorite Piece of Writing Advice from Natalie Goldberg
36. A Letter for Breaking Through Resistance
37. A Conversation with a Companion
38. I’ve Always Meant to Tell You: A Different Kind of Mother’s Day Greeting
40. A Clean Copy
41. Reading to Discover What You Most Want to Write
42. Making Peace with the Body
44. Rest Hour
A Dialogue or Conversation Poem: A Prompt for Writing and Healing
In a classic dialogue poem, as I understand it, you create two characters and they carry on a conversation—in poetry. A variation on this theme—a conversation poem?—is a writing idea I’ve shared with my students. I’ve been thinking for a while now that this existed somewhere in the world, and it probably does, but then again it’s possible I may have made it up. In any case, the way I’m thinking about a conversation poem is you actually write your lines between the poet’s lines—in a conversation. I think...
Two Self-Portraits: A Prompt for Writing and Healing
When I talk about drawing a map, I’m talking about picturing a kind of path between where you are now and where you want to be. One can make a one-year map. A five-year. A one-month. I also think it’s helpful to picture as a goal something that’s within the realm of the possible. If everything were to go as well as it possibly could, where would you want to be in X amount of time? Then all you have to do is draw it. It’s one of those...
How Do We Recognize a Safe Audience for Writing?
Peter Elbow, in his book, Writing With Power, makes a distinction between safe audiences and dangerous audiences. He proposes that we write more authentically when we’re writing for audiences that feel safe. He writes [p. 186]: First, a dangerous audience can inhibit not only the quantity of your words but also their quality. That is, if you are trying to talk to a dangerous audience, instead of finding yourself mixed up or tongue-tied or unable to think of anything to say [which, of course, can happen], you may find...
A Bit of Writing Advice from John Steinbeck: What He Did to Keep from Going Nuts
Just over forty years ago—on February 13 and 14 of 1962—John Steinbeck wrote some advice about writing to Robert Wallsten (a man who, it turns out, is one of the editors of Steinbeck’s letters). Steinbeck prefaced his advice on writing this way: Now let me give you the benefit of my experience in facing 400 pages of blank stock—the appalling stuff that must be filled. I know that no one really wants the benefit of anyone’s experience which is probably why it is so freely offered. But the following...
Emily’s Story: Reframing Anorexia
The thread this week (which, again, may or may not be apparent) is how looking at something in a different way can shift things. And perhaps one of the clearest instances I’ve seen of this shift happened with Emily, a young woman with anorexia who I’ve written about here before. She had severe anorexia, weighed only fifty-two pounds when I began seeing her. And she had, when I first began to see her, a definite point of view toward her body. She viewed her body as the problem—disgusting actually—a...
What If?
In his most recent book, Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene, a physicist with a particular gift for translating physics into plain language, tells about a game he used to play with his father, walking through the streets of Manhattan. It’s a game that may have uniquely prepared him to be a physicist, a game that involves shifting perspective. It’s also, I think, a potentially wonderful game for a writer—or for someone who is interested in looking at something—anything—in a new way. It’s like playing “I Spy”, but with...