Writing Prompts
The writing prompts in our newsletter are some of our most-loved content. We wanted to show you that we don't just write the prompts - we also utilize them in our own works. Below, all of our staffers have tackled a different writing prompt featured in one of our newsletters. We hope you enjoy our future prompts and use them to help inspire work you'll submit to RPD in the future!
Jen: Write about the person you think you would be if you had made a different choice at a critical juncture in your life.
Who would you be if you'd said no? Who would you be if you'd stayed where you are, if you continued down one path? Would you still be wondering what-if? Would you be a hero? Where would you call home? At 28 years old, I am going back to a time when I was much younger and trying to make up for lost time. If I hadn't missed out on my mid-twenties, if I hadn't gone home to take care of my mother, I don't know who I would be. My character would be a more exaggerated version of who I was four years ago, and I'm not sure if I would want to be that person. I walked the path that I did. I made the choices I had to make. I can't go back and undo my mother's illness or my parents dependence on me. But I can start over now. I can be young a little while longer. I can say that I don't know who I am yet - but I'm working on it.
- Jordan Rizzieri, Editor-in-Chief
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Bee: The Irish and the Portuguese have a shared cultural identity around the concept of SAUDADE, an untranslatable word that refers to a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Write free prose for a minute about something you know you'll never get back whether it be a time or a place or an idea.
When I was in college, all my friends lived together in the dorms, and later in on-campus apartment buildings that were clustered together, the farthest one no more than a minute from door to door. Seeing a friend was as easy as walking down the hall and could be done at almost any time of the day or night. People would drop in, drop out, stop by on their way from or to somewhere else, parties would swell and shrink and swell again as people came and went. One of my friends used to talk about buying a big house after college where we could all live together, but with our own rooms. Five years out of college, it's obvious that's never going to happen. I don't even want it to anymore. My relationships with most of them have changed, some in subtle ways, others glaringly obvious. Still, sometimes I wish I could go back to the time before those cracks formed; to living so close together that we were connected not just by friendship but by hallways and doors; when we were close in more ways than one; when the hardest part of visiting them was braving the Buffalo cold for 30 seconds, whereas now the hardest thing is deciding which friend I can visit this year because I only have enough money for one plane ticket.
- Jen Lombardo, Non-Fiction Editor
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Jordan: Take a moment to recall how many years removed from your high school graduation you are. Imagine a reunion was being held soon and that you (and all of your classmates) were forced to bring your 17- or 18-year_old self to the event as your date. What would you talk about? What events over the course of the life you've lived since you were them would you warn your younger self about? What would you keep from them? Write the scene, with dialogue, as a script. Adam: (Literature) Write a letter to a novel protagonist who has meant a great deal to you. Talk to them casually as if you've been friends for a while, because, in a way, you probably have. Don't postmark, don't send. Don't wait for a response.
I am taking my sixteen year old self
as my date to our ten-year high school reunion.
I am on my way to pick her up.
She didn't recognize me
when I asked her out.
I wanted to tell her
that she needed to stop agreeing to go out
with people so much older than her.
I wanted to tell her to make friends her own age.
Instead, I told her I'd pick her up at 7:00 pm.
I'm having a bad influence on myself,
but I need her to hear me.
I brought her a copy of Tom Robbin's
Still Life with Woodpecker,
because she shouldn't have to wait
five more years to learn about
blood and the moon.
I need her to know about 2011.
I need her to hear about our mother.
The reunion is in the same ballroom
where our prom was, balanced on the edge
of the sea. Ten years ago, I wrote a spell
on a napkin for a tidal wave, an act of
god, or something to come up from
the depths of the ocean to kill us all.
Instead, my date danced with everyone
but me and here I am now
with myself, introducing her to
people who dont rememebr
either of us.
"What shall we do, all of us? Us
passionate girls who fear
crushing the boys we love
with our mouths like caverns
of teeth, our mushrooming brains,
our watermelon hearts?"
She passed me a napkin
with a spell to turn us into
glitter and blow us out the window.
We both thought it would work.
We took each other out the back door.
She ran into the ocean
arms out like the Virgin Mary
of Reckless Abandonment.
- Bee Walsh, Poetry Editor
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Adam: Write a letter to a novel protagonist who has meant a great deal to you. Talk to them casually as if you've been friends for a while, because, in a way, you probably have. Don't postmark, don't send. Don't wait for a response.
Dear Fyodor,
It's been some time since I've written you. It's been some time since I've thought much on you or your words, despite the fact that I have the hopeful ones imprinted on my forearm. Admittedly, I sometimes forget they are there. I sometimes forget quite a bit, and then I remember before losing it again. I think that's a blessing, and I think it is one I have given myself.
The days are different now. They are busy and complacent. There are minor pangs of it still, twinges, that surface only when time goes too long unoccupied. And unoccupied time is less the case now than in years prior when I wrote to you more frequently.
So for all intents and purposes, I am mostly content.
Yours in the silence we've shared,
Adam Robinson, Fiction Editor
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Bee: I've been trading emails with poet Jeremy Radin the past few weeks, all loosely centered around the theme of our Ideal Winter. Write a letter, long or short, to anyone (or no one) about your Ideal Winter.
Sis -
I wonder sometimes if my vision of winter - the winter in my daydreams - is the result of being left out. You and Mom and Dad have all experienced Proper Winters; I'm the only one among us who's never lived in Alaska. Those things that are heritage for our family are only footnotes for me.
I have never seen the Northern Lights. I have never seen starlight at noon.
My ideal winter is dark. Stars, streetlights, and sparkling snow - have you ever been awake at 4 a.m.? I'm sure you have; you work too hard to escape it. There's an isolation at that pre-dawn hour, a stubborn quiet that assures us that we are the only ones awake. The unbroken quiet - the promise of both solitude and possibility - that's what I think of when I close my eyes and think of the cold.
I never thought that cold and loneliness - lifelessness and lightlessness - would ever feel so much like belonging.
- Wilson Josephson, Assistant Poetry Editor
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Jordan: Keep track of all the Facebook statuses, Tumblr posts and Tweets you don't send or end up deleting. Splice them together into a poem.
this city is full of ghosts
i saw him again
it was / it wasn't
it is / it couldn't be
another deep breath for the lone road
my fingers aren't long enough to reach you
just long enough to draw thin lines
in all the places i shouldn't
another deep breath for the long road
my arms are wrapped around myself
just long enough to offer a bit of seclusion
in all the places i shouldn't
"thinking of you, but not often"
thinking of you, but too often
there's a whole story we could have written
several months skewed,
several counties through
what's the cost for a line in another song?
channeling a simple
(simple?)
(simple)
thought
into as many formats as we can
an escalation / too taut again / a longing / too fraught within / a conversation / too in the dark to break light
this could have been something, something, something
in any other city, scene, time
see you on the other side.
- Kaity Davie, Social Media Manager