Some notes on prompts and constraints
Dear Students,
After last week’s notes*, on some possible ways to get started with a new story, one of you raised a hand and said that, well, actually, the ideas and the starting points were not a concern for you; that your challenge lies in, ‘deciding what is story vs what is back-story, and HOW to tell this particular story.’
Which is a great question. It was framed as more of a comment than a question, but I’m taking it as a question: how do we tell this particular story? How do we tell this particular story? How do we understand what a particular story is doing or trying to do and how do we find a way of making it make sense to a reader and how do we put all the bits of information in the right order and find all the right voices and modes and capture a sense of what this particular story might be? I mean, write the question out on a giant post-it note and underline just about every word, and you’ve got yourself a creative writing syllabus:
>How> do >we> »tell» >this> »particular» story?
I’m going to need to give it some thought. We’ll come back to it next week.
Meanwhile, I promised to expand a little on some of the ideas around prompts and constraints which I listed in the last Notes.
I’ve often made use of writing constraints, even before I knew what to call them, but I’m relatively new to the idea of prompts. I was introduced to their use by Thomas Morris, who asked me to write a short story for the brilliant Stinging Fly magazine, which was a welcome invitation except that he wanted me to write it in a single night.
A preposterous idea, I said, which plays into all those flawed ideas about writing being something that happens in a flash of inspiration, late at night, with an ashtray and whisky bottle at hand.
This is macho, Hemingwayish balderdash, I said. You can’t be serious. Let’s do it. And so one evening, at 7pm, an email arrived with a promised ‘writing prompt.’ This turned out to be a list of five words, with a request to include those words in a short story:
Bed. Buried. Velvet. River. Father.
This, to me, didn’t feel like enough of a prompt. Including those words anywhere in a 3000 word story felt like something that would just happen more or less by chance; this didn’t feel like a puzzle I needed to solve, or a problem to work around. (I have found, often, that I write most productively when I’m trying to solve a puzzle or work around a problem. This, for me, is the whole point of using constraints.) I decided to put all five words in the first sentence, and after a large cup of coffee and a lot of staring at the words, this sentence just kind of popped out:
We buried my father in the dry river bed.
It was like solving an anagram. It was also, as a therapist might gently point out, possibly related to the death of my own father, the experience of the pandemic, and the watching of a lot of dystopian Netflix dramas. But I was one word short. Hang on:
We buried my father in the dry river bed, with fires on the horizon and engines turning over in the deep velvet distance of the coming night.
I may have drunk a lot of coffee, even at this early stage of the evening. But once I had this sentence, I immediately had a lot of questions to answer and problems to solve. By 1am I had most of a story; by 7am, I had a few hours sleep, and time enough to type up, edit, find an ending, and deliver the finished version. (You can listen to an interview with the other writers who took part in this foolishness intriguing experiment here.)
That’s one example of using prompts. As I outlined in last week’s Notes, there are many ways of rolling the dice on these starting points, but for me the key idea is to give you enough of a nudge to get started. Oh, look, it turns out you’re writing a story about a man standing up in a rowing boat with a cake in one hand and a large beach-ball in the other? And the rowing boat has come untied? Well, it’s not what I would have chosen but at least I’m not stuck staring at a blank page. Let’s go…
And now we’re out of time. Let’s look at constraints next week.
Homework this week is: write a short story using three different locations from What3Words. Use the three words of your first location to write the first paragraph/section. Move to another location and repeat. Move to a third location and repeat. (For obvious privacy reasons, don’t do this at home.)
Send me what you come up with – by replying to this email – and I’ll send feedback until I run out time.
A final logistical note: in the UK, students can register to vote at both their term-time and home addresses, in order to make use of their vote at whichever address they happen to be on polling day. Details here. You can also, if you plan to be away on the 4th July, apply for either a proxy or postal vote.
Please, vote.
* time is an illusion, obvs
Not sure how I missed that issue… pandemic haze? going to order. Also looking forward to your interview related to that issue. Maybe wait until I have read story? Thanks for this 3 word site. I just may try!