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Writing and Healing Prompts

The writing and healing prompts gathered here have been developed and gathered over the past 10 years or so, and are now numbered—beginning with the earliest prompts posted in 2006.

In addition, I’ve started in 2016 posting twice daily writing prompts at Twitter. These prompts are different than the numbered ones below, and you can read more about them and see the prompts here.

Please feel free to share any of the writing prompts as you wish—

1. Designing a Healing Retreat

2. Freewriting

3. The Body as a Healing Place

4. The Easiest Writing and Healing Exercise Ever

5. A Shopping Spree

6. Discovering Needs and Desires

7. Has Writing Ever Changed Your Life?

8. Buy a Box

9. The Mystery of Language

10. Conjuring New Images and Metaphors for Healing

11. A Scavenger Hunt

12. Falling Apart

13. Lifelines

14. Considering a Package

15. Listing What Remains

16. A Walk on a Strange Street

17. Steps for Making a Written Collage

18. The Things We Carry

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 the Shape of the Story

27. What Am I Here For? (part one) //    What Am I Here For? (part two)

28. Consulting with the Wizard of Oz

29. A Title for Your Quest

30. Choosing Chapter Titles

31. Locating a Turning Point

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

39. Changing the Plot

40. A Clean Copy

41. Reading to Discover What You Most Want to Write

42. Imagining the Future

43. Rest Hour

44. What Audience Do You Imagine When You’re Writing?

45. Drawing a Map

46. Opening the Door

47. Choose a Word

48. Locating a Potential for Change

49. What Really Counts in This Life?

50. Listening in the Silence

51. Ira Progoff’s Stepping Stones

52. Stepping Stones in 3 dimensions

53. Words as Snowshoes

54. Become a Lake

55. Gratitude as Antidote

56. What if Appearances Are Deceptive?

57. Instructions by Neil Gaiman: The Writing Prompts

58. Writing about Rain

A Dialogue or Conversation Poem: A Prompt for Writing and Healing

Posted by on October 12, 2011 in Blog, Healing Poetry, Writing and Healing Prompts

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 the best way to begin this is to first copy the poem out, leaving spaces after every second or third or fourth line.  You could do this on paper or on a computer document.  And it could happen that as you were writing you would find yourself stopping to ask a question or to respond—and then you could put your questions and responses in the spaces between lines.  Maybe in italics?  Or indented?  And then you could begin to work your way toward some back and forth and see what happens.  It’s yet another way of responding to a poem.  Of imprinting a poem.  Of making it your own. It could look something like this, using Mary Oliver’s “Journey” as an example: One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice your response . . . something about those voices that are shouting, the voices you imagine and what advice they are actually shouting and what is it that makes the advice so bad or wrong.  what is precisely the wrong advice now? though the whole house began to tremble your response . . . what you see what you wonder about when you picture the whole house trembling or whatever it is you imagine when you consider that a single action you make could cause an entire house to tremble.  what’s it like to have that kind of power? and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. your response . . .  oh, now the voices in the poem are using actual words and they are not just asking they are demanding–they require mending.  And what does it feel like not to stop for them?  Or maybe would you?  Whose voice would cause you to stop?  Whose wouldn’t? These are just a couple ideas.  Of course you could do it differently. I’m just remembering now where I first got the idea for this.  It was when I was teaching writing at Prodigals Community, a residential recovery center.  A woman, M., wrote a poem and when I read the poem I was very taken with it and I ended up asking her a few questions about it.  She didn’t answer my questions just then, but she wrote the answers to my questions as new lines in the poem!  She inserted the new lines into the document in italics—between the old lines and shared it with me the next week. There was something so powerful about this.  Like revision happening actively on the page.  Like a conversation with me as reader happening inside the poem—or a conversation with her own self. See also Healing poetry The Journey...

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Drawing a Map

Posted by on October 4, 2011 in Blog, Writing and Healing Prompts

Drawing a Map

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 things that can seem so simple. But it can also turn out to be surprisingly powerful.   Find as large as sheet of paper as possible. The first self-portrait, where you are now, is drawn in the lower left-hand corner. The portrait doesn’t have to be skilled. Stick figures are fine. Symbols. Pictures cut from magazines. Photographs. Collage. The second portrait, where you would like to be, goes in the upper right-hand corner. Again, any kind of portrait is fine–literal or figurative. Between these two portraits is the map. You can draw a line that twists and turns between the self-portraits. You can draw branches and detours and obstacles. You can label stations or stepping stones along the way—add titles and notes and paragraphs. You can make lists. When you’re finished, take at least 20 minutes or so and write about what you’ve drawn. What surprises you? What compels you? What place on the map seems clearly to be the next step? And the next?  ...

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