Writing Prompt 67: Look
My youngest daughter has always loved words. As a tiny toddler, I would find her lying in her bed, tucked up, turning the pages of novels plucked from our bookshelf, books without pictures, books not for tiny toddlers.
She loved to make up her own stories using the words she could look at but not read.
My tiny toddler is now 17. Recently, her English teacher set the students a challenging task. Write a poem a day for two weeks — twenty lines in twenty minutes following a different prompt each time.
Now, I may be biased (most definitely am) but my daughter's poems are wonderful — somehow, in such a short amount of time, she wrote poems full of melancholy and sadness. Her imagination knows no bounds. However, there was one prompt that had her a bit stumped.
The prompt went something like this: The first line should capture an inward experience — a sensation, a taste, a sound, or a fleeting image, that sort of thing. The following line should focus on the outward experience, describing the world around you – the whisper of the wind, the blur of a speeding car or the cry of a child at the bus stop.
And so it went, alternating between the inner and outer experience, line by line, until the poem reached its twenty-line finale.
My daughter worried that her creation lacked cohesion, that it made no sense, the constant back-and-forth making it difficult to maintain a satisfying rhythm. She felt her poem was stilted and disjointed.
I tried to remind her gently, that while understanding her worry, sometimes meaningful writing requires venturing off the beaten track — sometimes you need to embrace new ideas rather than relying on tried and tested routes.
Pondering this prompt, I'm wondering if this exercise might be valuable for any form of creative writing — composing songs, crafting stories or writing poetry. The constant shift between internal and external perspectives might spark fresh ideas for you to explore — a place to discover new areas of thought and expression.
Why not have a go?
Spend a few minutes looking at the photograph above.
I'll give you an idea of where to start:
Your first line should be from where you stand within the frame. Are you standing alongside the photographer, or are you one of the figures gazing out at the breathtaking vista? What are you feeling, thinking, seeing, hearing? Your next line: what is happening around you? Or to you?
Keep going, inward and outward. You can stick to the twenty lines in twenty minutes or create your own limits. Or maybe there are no limits. That’s up to you.
Have fun!
Photo by Tanya Clarke 2024 - Govett’s Leap, Blue Mountains, Australia
