Priming the Pump: The Value of Writing Prompts
My fourteen-year-old creative writing student and I had our last session of the semester before summer break. She is a gifted writer already working on a novel. When I asked her what she enjoyed the most about our sessions, she said, “The writing prompts. I feel like it gets our creative juices going.”
I had to agree! We do them together and share our work with each other. It’s been wonderful practice, and I think it’s helped both of us grow as writers.
I’ve also benefited from the writing exercises in the craft books my critique group regularly reads. Currently, we’re studying Steve Almond’s TRUTH IS THE ARROW, MERCY IS THE BOW, one of the best books I’ve ever read about writing. At the end of his chapter on obsession as a necessary engine of literature, he suggests doing a free write on the most persistent obsession we had as a kid and advises that whatever feels “the most embarrassing to admit is probably the most deserving of attention.” Below is the one I wrote:
Three is never a good number, especially when you’re the one who feels like an outsider and longs to be let into the magic circle. As a kid, I wanted so badly to break into the tight dyad of my older sisters whom I worshipped but who largely viewed me as a humongous annoyance. Only four and seven at the time they lost their mom, they associated my arrival on the scene with Mom’s catastrophic descent into mental illness and her subsequent institutionalization. To this day, our middle sister feels that during her childhood, our oldest sister functioned as her mother, the one she looked to for comfort and expertise on surviving the lousy cards they’d been dealt—a missing mother and a workaholic father who was rarely around, and when he was, subject to dark moods. Some nights he’d come home and wouldn’t speak to us.
The trips to visit our mother after she got out of the mental hospital were a metaphor for our sibling dynamics. My oldest sister drove and my middle sister rode shotgun, while they talked in hushed tones only to each other. I was assigned the backseat, despite being the one who suffered from carsickness. My sisters would light up cigarette after cigarette, and I’d hang my head out the back window, praying not to throw up before we got to our mom’s apartment.
When my sisters did speak to me, it was mostly to tell me how annoying I was, or that I got my feelings hurt too easily (absolutely true) or that I wasn’t singing my part correctly when we’d sing “White Carol Bells” as a round while we did the dishes. I still remember how shocked I was in eighth grade when my music teacher told me she loved my musicality. I’d always assumed that whatever judgments about me my older sisters rendered were unquestionable truth.
Of course, my sisters and I have come a long way in our relationship since those days. I know they love me, and I love them and am grateful that I still have them in my life. We zoom every week and are about to have a sisters’ reunion in June.
And yet, undercurrents from our childhood simmer just beneath the surface in our relationships. There are times when I remain acutely aware that on some level, I will always be the outsider.