Starting from a prompt

That distinction decides whether a prompt works at all. Told to write about home, a room produces 20 versions of the same essay about how home is where the heart is. Told to write down the 3 sounds a house makes when everybody else is asleep, the same room produces 20 poems that are not alike, and every one of them is about home without having to say so. Spoken word poetry lives on that kind of detail, because a listener has one pass at a line and cannot go back up the page. How to write a poem sets out the whole route, and the prompt is stage 1 of 11.

What is a poetry prompt actually for?

A poetry prompt is for removing the real obstacle in creative writing, which is not a lack of inspiration but the size of the field. A blank page offers every subject at once, and a beginner answers that by picking the biggest and most respectable one available. A prompt does 3 things to that problem.

• It narrows the field: one instruction, one small territory, and no decision left about what the poem is nominally about.
• It makes a first line possible: the writer starts on a concrete noun instead of a thesis, which is the only opening that reliably produces a second line.
• It gives permission: the prompt is to blame for the subject, so the writer can be honest about it and can disown the poem afterwards.

Adults underrate the third one. A young writer told to write about a photograph on their phone has cover; a young writer asked to write about their feelings has none, and a room shows the difference within 2 minutes.

Where do you find a prompt when nothing has been assigned?

You find a prompt in the nearest 3 metres, or 10 feet, rather than on a list: an object in a pocket, the last photograph taken on a phone, the view from one window, a receipt, a scar, a bus route, the last thing somebody said before leaving the room. Published collections are a good index and a poor master, and the ones circulated on Pinterest or in seasonal packs tend to favour mood over specificity, which is the wrong way round. A Halloween prompt about fear yields less than an instruction to describe the exact noise the boiler makes at night.

A borrowed first line is the other dependable source, with one rule attached. Take a line from a published poem, use it as line 1 to get moving, then delete it once the poem has found its own opening, which usually happens by line 4 or 5. The borrowed line is scaffolding. Leaving it in and calling the result yours is the single way this method goes wrong, and it is worth saying out loud before anybody starts.

Which 12 starting lines can a room use today?

These 12 starting lines are prompts a room can use in the next 10 minutes with no materials and no theme. Each is written as an instruction, because an instruction produces a draft and a topic produces a delay. Offer 2 of them to choose between, never 1, and never all 12 at once.

• Write the 3 sounds your home makes when everybody else is asleep.
• Describe the object in your pocket to somebody who will never see it.
• Name every person who has stood in your kitchen this month.
• Write down the last thing somebody said to you before they left the room.
• Take the journey you make most often and write only what is on the left.
• Explain a rule in your house that exists in nobody else's house.
• Write the instructions for something only you know how to do.
• Describe a photograph on your phone without saying who is in it.
• Write what the room said after you had gone.
• List 5 things you were told about yourself before you were 10.
• Write a word from your first language that English handles badly, then the poem around it.
• Finish this and keep going: nobody in this building knows that I.

Adults working with primary school writers, or with the elementary age equivalent in another system, keep the physical instructions and drop the confessional ones, so the sounds, the object, the kitchen and the journey do the work while the last line on the list waits a few years. Six minutes of writing is usually the right length at that age.

How does a prompt change what gets written?

A prompt changes what gets written by changing the first noun, and the first noun decides the poem. Start on a thing and the writing goes towards images, which are what a listener can hold. Start on a concept and it goes towards explanation, which is what makes a room stop listening. That is the whole influence prompts have on creative writing, and it is why the strongest ones contain a number, a sense or a piece of furniture rather than an emotion. Phrasing matters too: a question invites an answer and answers arrive as prose, while a command invites an action and actions arrive as lines.

What do you do when the prompt produces nothing?

When the prompt produces nothing, ask the standing question instead: what do you know that the room does not? Not the biggest thing that has happened to you, the most particular. Everybody in a room knows something nobody else in it knows, and it is almost never dramatic. It is the smell of one stairwell, a job a family member does, a word used at home for a thing that has another name at school, the order of a Sunday.

Three moves beat changing the prompt again. Write the boring version deliberately, on the understanding that nobody will read it. Write the thing you would not say, on paper you intend to keep. Or write for 6 minutes without stopping and without correcting, which produces a page that is 90 per cent unusable and 10 per cent the poem.

How does an adult run the prompt at the front of a session?

An adult running the prompt is protecting the first 8 minutes, and most of what goes wrong here is a failure to protect them. Offer 2 prompts and let the room pick. Write alongside them, visibly, for the whole time. Say at the start that nobody will be asked to read anything out today, then keep that promise, because a room made to read in week 1 writes carefully in week 2, and careful is the enemy of a first draft.

Agree how the room will talk about writing before any of it is read: How a writing circle gives feedback covers those rules and why each exists. Say plainly what happens if a poem suggests a young writer is at risk, because the confidentiality of the room has a limit and week 1 is the fair time to state it. And keep the prompt as far from the performance as possible, since the room in which a prompt is written should feel nothing like the room in which a poem is finally said, and Nerves, and what to do with them deals with the second one.