Writing Prompts & Exercises

In her memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May, Yiyun Li writes about the loss of her two teenage sons. After her son Vincent’s death, Li wrote a book for him “in which a mother and a dead child continue their conversation across the border of life and death.” However, she finds that her son James’s character and their relationship evade her desire to write a book for him and in composing this memoir, Li embarks on a project to find a new alphabet, a new language, and a new way of storytelling. Taking inspiration from Li, write a lyrical essay about someone you have lost in a style that reflects their personality and your relationship, in all its complexities. Allow yourself to be experimental with structure and chronology.

Directed Boris Lojkine, the award-winning French drama film Souleymane’s Story follows a young immigrant from Guinea who prepares for his interview to seek asylum refugee status in Paris. In the harrowing forty-eight hours prior to his interview, Souleymane careens through the streets as a bike courier for a food delivery app account he rents for a hefty fee from a fellow immigrant, tries to memorize falsified stories about political imprisonment another immigrant coaches him on for a fee, and rushes to find a bed each night in a homeless shelter. Write a personal essay that recounts a momentous event from your life and begins forty-eight hours before the climactic scene. Try playing with focused descriptions of your surroundings and the style of your prose to reflect the pacing and dramatic moments of your story.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Five years later, it may all feel like a distant dream (or nightmare) or completely forgotten, but there’s no denying that the pandemic created irrevocable changes in our world, both big and small. Write a personal essay that reflects on how your life has transformed in the last five years. You might trace certain hopes, fears, or expectations as they evolved over the course of each year and consider where you are today. What have been the biggest shifts in your mindset regarding relationships with family and friends, socializing, health, finances, and travel?

Have you ever conducted an oral history interview? There are many reasons for recording one, from documenting family stories to reporting the experiences of survivors of tragedies and storing knowledge and perspectives of a particular region or culture. Try your hand at documenting personal reflections by turning to a friend, acquaintance, or family member and conduct a short interview with them, selecting a particular element of their life that you would be curious to know more about and that they wouldn’t mind sharing. You might browse your local library’s oral history projects, maps, and photographs for ideas. Afterward, write a personal essay about the experience. How did preparing the questions and asking someone to share their stories affect the dynamic of your relationship?

In a recent New York Times Magazine interview, Dr. Anna Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist who studies a variety of addictions from substance abuse to social media, talks about her speculative theory about contemporary society and narcissism. “Our culture is demanding that we focus on ourselves so much that what it’s creating is this deep need to escape ourselves,” she says. Take a break from self-actualization and write an essay that focuses on a close friend or loved one to create a lyrical profile of sorts. If you instinctively relate your observations and memories back to yourself, correct course and try to place the focus as much as possible on someone else. What emerges as a result?

The science fiction thriller television series Severance, created by Dan Erickson, is centered around a group of characters who work on a classified project at a corporation and undergo a “severance” procedure, in which their nine-to-five workday selves have compartmentalized memories, separate from their outside-world selves, in effect creating two entirely differentiated lived experiences. In the pilot episode, it’s revealed that the main character Mark underwent the procedure after he lost his wife to a car accident, and in his grief was unable to continue with his job as a college history professor. Write a nonfiction piece that explores this idea of severance, speculating on a certain portion or element of your life that you would consider “severing” from your day-to-day consciousness. Though there might be gains, would they outweigh the losses?

During a time of year when many people are taking stock of the previous twelve months and preparing for new resolutions and fresh starts, take a brief contrarian turn and compose a personal essay that focuses on the well-trodden: old habits, die-hard routines, and tried-and-true tendencies. What are some things that you’d passionately never want to give up? Perhaps your essay is a compilation of a list of objects, behaviors, people, or traditions that have proven their worth over an extended period of time; or you might concentrate your essay on one specific subject, something dear you vow to hold onto. Are there trade-offs, sacrifices, or curiosities about the costs of keeping the old? How do you weigh any misgivings against your convictions?

In the documentary No Other Land, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors over the course of five years, a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank is overrun by the Israeli military as they raid and bulldoze homes while families are forced to witness the destruction. At a recent screening in New York, the filmmakers shared their thoughts in a written statement: “We as young activists offer this film to the world, which is both a document of a war crime happening now in the occupied West Bank, and a plea for a different future.” Write a personal essay that begins with recounting a recent significant event that you witnessed, noting as much granular detail as possible. If available, you might refer to photos or a paper trail to help you remember specifics. In addition to the event itself, reflect on your outlook after the event, documenting both for posterity’s sake.

In National Lampoon’s Vacation comedy film series from the 1980s—comprising of a cross-country road trip, a tour through Europe, and a Christmas holiday gathering, as well as several offshoots—much of the humor stems from the discrepancy between Clark Griswold’s expectations of a “perfect” family time with his wife and two children, and the madcap mishaps, accidents, and disasters that occur while attempting to fulfill obligations. Write a memoiristic essay that recounts a family trip or occasion when not everything went as planned. Did one moment cause everything to go off the rails, or was it something more gradual? Reflect on your expectations or standards and how reevaluating this incident might contribute to a more expansive idea of how a family functions.

“As a Palestinian, I have been brought up on stories and storytelling. It’s both selfish and treacherous to keep a story to yourself—stories are meant to be told and retold,” writes the late Refaat Alareer in his collection of poetry and prose, If I Must Die, out now from OR Books. “If I allowed a story to stop, I would be betraying my legacy, my mother, my grandmother, and my homeland.” Taking inspiration from Alareer’s words about the power of storytelling, reflect on a story from your own life that is “meant to be told.” Write a memoiristic piece that uses evocative imagery and dynamic pacing, paying particular attention to elements that might facilitate its oral retelling.

What happens when language fails? Writers are always in search of the mot juste, the perfect turn of poetic phrase, the best sequence of sentences for a story or essay. But in real life, communicating is not always about the most creative arrangement of words, and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time can hurt someone you love, especially when it’s in writing. This week consider writing a personal essay that reflects on memories of past experiences, situations, or encounters in which something went awry in the process of expressing yourself in words—perhaps due to crossed wires around usage, tone, or context. What forces were underlying the discrepancy or distance between intended and perceived sentiment? How does looking closely at this incident transform your understanding of language and its consequences?

A situationship, as defined by the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, is “a romantic relationship in which the couple are not official partners.” The validity of situationships has become the center of discussions, from Reddit posts to the list of finalists for Oxford Languages 2023 word of the year. In a recent Electric Literature piece, author Christine Ma-Kellams argues that situationships make for great stories, including within novels by Elif Batuman, Rachel Cusk, and Jennifer Egan. Write a personal essay on your understanding of situationships. Have you ever found yourself in one? Was there a mutual agreement or were there unsaid uncertainties in the relationship? Consider how you would define a situationship and what that means to you.

In a 2019 New York Times essay revisiting Alexander Payne’s 1999 film, Election—based on Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name about a high school student-body election showdown between overachiever Tracy Flick and a social studies teacher—critic A.O. Scott reconsiders his understanding of the movie’s hero and villain twenty years later. “Payne’s film exposes the casual misogyny baked into the structures of civic and scholastic life,” writes Scott. “How despicably does a man have to behave before he forfeits our sympathy? How much does a woman—a teenage girl—have to suffer before she earns it?” Look back on previous presidential election years and reflect on major events that may have occurred in your personal life during those times. Were there heroes and villains who you might cast in a different light now?

Francis Ford Coppola’s new film, Megalopolis, takes some of its characters, relationships, political intrigue, and set and costume design from historic events that occurred around 63 BCE during the decline of the Roman Republic. Mashed up with this historical aspect is a setting that gestures to both contemporary cities, such as New York City, and futuristic science fiction elements, such as building materials with magical properties. Compose an essay that revisits a pivotal experience from your past and incorporates a speculative element by taking metaphors and the act of imagining beyond their usual boundaries. How do you balance details grounded in the reality you remember with the more ambiguous elements of emotions and imagination?

Vinyl records, audiocassette tapes, videocassettes, CDs, DVDs, hard-copy books, print editions of newspapers and magazines. Whether these tangible forms of media conjure up personal memories or seem like vintage vestiges from a time before you were born, there’s no denying that physical media undergoes continual waves of resurgence among both serious collectors and pop culture trend followers. Write an essay that revolves around your experiences with physical media, including encounters or stories from older family members or friends. Reflect on the differences in using various types of media and ideas about convenience, possession, and preservation.

In the 2023 horror film No One Will Save You, written and directed by Brian Duffield, a young woman named Brynn finds herself fighting off aliens who have invaded her home. In the course of the movie’s entire ninety-three minutes, Brynn speaks only five words. Instead of relying on dialogue, the building tension in the story is propelled by the facial expressions and body language of actor Kaitlyn Dever and the physical constraints of the premise—the lonely and isolated protagonist, shunned by the locals, needs to stay quiet as she confronts the alien invaders. Taking a cue from this concept, write a lyric essay that looks back on a stressful or tense event from your past. Focus on observations of actions, objects, surroundings, and people—including facial expressions and perceived emotions—and try to forgo inner monologue. What can you accomplish with primarily physical descriptions?

“The writing comes not with the then and then and then of narrative time driven by the hierarchy of information that plot demands, but with the and and and and and of parataxis. Everything is equal all together and all at once,” writes Jennifer Kabat in her debut memoir, The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion (Milkweed Editions, 2024), which combines the author’s musings on her relocation to the rural Catskills in New York with historical documents and research about the Anti-Rent War between tenant farmers and landowners that took place in the region in the early nineteenth century. Take a deep dive into a historical event that took place where you live and write an essay that attempts to bridge your own experiences and memories of your locale with the past. Inspired by Kabat, experiment with alternating back and forth through different time periods, point of view, and verb tense for a sense of simultaneity.

In Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, published by W. W. Norton in June, author and journalist Annalee Newitz chronicles the ways storytelling can be wielded as a manipulative tool to further political agendas and steer cultural perspective, through advertising, influence campaigns, and mass media. In the first chapter Newitz discusses how Sigmund Freud’s theories help sell products: “Advertisers began to study psychology to figure out ways to manipulate the unconscious minds of consumers,” she writes. “They would lure consumers in with emotional appeals or by associating a product with some political ideal like freedom.” Write a personal essay about a time when you were persuaded by a narrative—whether it be a story told to you by a friend, foe, colleague, family member, or even an advertisement. Were you able to separate from your unconscious mind and gain a fuller perspective on the situation?

“When I say I have written from the beginning, I mean that all real writers write from the beginning, that the vocation, the obsession, is already there, and that the obsession derives from an intensity of feeling which normal life cannot accommodate,” said the late Irish author Edna O’Brien in a 1984 interview for the Paris Review’s Art of Fiction series. O’Brien, who died last Saturday at the age of ninety-three, was the author of a series of novels beginning with The Country Girls, which were internationally acclaimed but banned in Ireland. Her work included memoirs, biographies, and plays, many of which revolved around intimate stories of women’s experiences of love and loss. Write a lyric essay that responds to O’Brien’s sentiment about being drawn to writing from “an intensity of feeling.” Does writing serve in some sense as an outlet for expressing something that seemingly can’t fit into the strictures of normal life?

“I have known brilliant writers who could size people up in minutes with alarming accuracy.... And yet for all their ability to understand people, to see them, to capture them as characters, these writers could not see themselves,” writes Literary Hub editor-in-chief Jonny Diamond in a piece reflecting on a recent op-ed written by the daughter of Nobel laureate Alice Munro, Andrea Skinner, about her mother’s failure to protect her from sexual abuse by her stepfather. Write a personal essay that traces your self-awareness through several phases of your life, contemplating on how your understanding and perception of yourself has transformed through the years. Can you reconcile the differing points of view that various people in your life hold about you? Are there blind spots that, even if you can’t or don’t want to articulate, you wish to acknowledge?

In an interview by Margaret Ross for the Art of Nonfiction series published in the Summer 2024 issue of the Paris Review, author and Harvard University professor Elaine Scarry says, “I see my writing on imagination and on war as continuous. Or rather, the two subjects are essentially locked in combat, because the act of inflicting injury or pain is really a willful aping of imagination, turning it upside down and appropriating it.” Write a lyric essay that braids together two subjects: Use the imagination or the artistic process as one topic, and then choose another subject that may seem “locked in combat” with your ideas around creativity, perhaps one more adjacent to pain or distress. What kind of truth can be coaxed to the surface when you think about the connections between them?

This year’s summer solstice arrives in the Northern Hemisphere on June 20, marking it the longest day, and shortest night, of the year. And yet, no matter the exact number of daylight or nighttime hours measured out, any day can feel like a very long day, just as any night can end in the blink of an eye. Write a two-part lyric essay in which the first part details one long summer day you’ve experienced, and the second part focuses on one short summer night. For the day that seemed to last forever, did it drag on and on, producing exasperation, or did the hours ooze dreamily and pleasurably? For the night that whizzed by, was there nonstop action that was over before you knew it?

Nearly fifty years ago, the writer George Perec spent three days sitting behind a café window in Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris recording everything he saw. In his short book, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, his observations of mundane occurrences and objects often considered unnoteworthy—passersby, cars, buses, pigeons, signs, and slogans—are documented. This week situate yourself in one spot, perhaps in your home or workplace, or in a public space like a park, busy crossroad, commercial area, library, or café. Then, jot down the objects and behavior you see, and the snippets of conversation you hear. Write a lyric essay composed of these notes, trying to avoid interpretations or analysis. Taken together, how do your observations create a portrayal of a specific time or place? Pay particular attention to how one observation might lead to another, and to potential rhythms and repetitions.

Many foods, flavors, and dishes hold a wellspring of emotional associations because they remind us of loved ones, habits and traditions, specific locales, and a different time of our lives when we were different people. Write a series of flash nonfiction pieces this week with each segment focusing on an edible item that evokes particularly resonant memories for you. You might begin by jotting down lists of foods you ate regularly growing up—breakfasts, school lunches, vending machine go-tos, favorite fast-food joints, diners, late night spots, home-cooked specialties—as well as a few momentous meals. Who are the people you associate with each one? Aside from taste and smell, consider the surrounding environment, atmospheric sounds, time of year, and who you were at that point in your life.

A recent study in Scientific Reports journal revealed that, for possibly the first time, a nonhuman wild animal was seen using plant medicine to heal an active wound. In a rainforest in Indonesia, a Sumatran orangutan was observed ripping off leaves from a climbing vine plant, chewing them, and applying the plant sap to treat a wound on his face, which then healed after a few days. Write a personal essay on the theme of self-healing. Think about experiences when you’ve witnessed another person perform this task, or particularly resonant memories that pertain to your own past behavior. What are the primary emotions present throughout this process? What instances of self-treatment or self-medication in film, art, or literature created an impression on you?

In a recent interview with Aria Aber for the Yale Review, when asked his thoughts on the responsibility of the poet, Jackson Prize–winning poet Fady Joudah says, “I often think that the responsibility of the poet is to strive to become the memory that people may possess in the future about what it means to be human: an ever-changing constant. In poetry, the range of metaphors and topics is limited, predictable, but the styles are innumerable. Think how we read poetry from centuries ago and are no longer bothered by its outdated diction. All that remains of old poetry is the music of what it means to be human.” Write a creative nonfiction piece that presents your personal theory of the responsibility of a writer or an artist. To construct an expansive approach, you might use observations about how different creative disciplines overlap in their goals, or consider what has remained resonant as the arts make their mark throughout various eras.

In a 1789 letter, Benjamin Franklin wrote the phrase, “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Franklin was reflecting on the establishment of the U.S. Constitution, which he said promised to be durable, as well as his own ailing health and mortality. This week write a personal essay that riffs off this proverb, reflecting on your own worldview about what can be certain. You might start off with the prompt: “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and ______.” Tell the story of how you arrived at your own ideas about what you can always count on, whether good or bad. What past experiences, encounters, or memories seem to reinforce your belief?

How do you tell the tale of your nose, lips, teeth, eyes, brows, and cheeks? This week, study yourself closely in a mirror, and write a memoiristic essay that relays the backstories of your facial features. Are there elements that have shifted, scarred, or been modified in some way with orthodontics, makeup, surgery, or the natural processes of aging? Have there ever been parts of your countenance that you’ve disliked or preferred, and has that changed over time? Take a long, hard look at yourself and reflect on the memories that come up and how your facial expressions and textures have evolved. You might decide to cover just one or two features, or be inspired to cover each part of your face and how they all have a story.

In her groundbreaking 1962 book, Silent Spring, biologist Rachel Carson foretold of “a spring without voices.” Documenting the harmful effects of chemical pesticides used in the agricultural industry, her book sparked an awakening to the environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s and launched a movement that brought about the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. “The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings,” she writes. “Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.” Write an essay that begins by examining how the environment, whether natural or manufactured, has molded you. Then consider how you have modified your surrounding environment—the nature of your world.

In a recent essay in the New York Times Magazine, Mireille Silcoff explores the evolving concept of subcultures and how teenagers today are primarily engaged with subcultural aesthetics (such as Preppy, Messy French It Girl, Dark Academia, and Goblincore) popularized on social media, “a fleeting personal pleasure to be had mainly alone.” Silcoff argues that there is no longer a shared experience and work to get into a scene, and that “subcultures in general—once the poles of style and art and politics and music around which wound so many ribbons of teenage meaning—have largely collapsed.” Write a personal essay about a subculture you were engaged with long ago or more recently. Detail your introduction to the scene, the behaviors, styles, and accessories that accompanied it, and its positioning within society at large. How did this sense of belonging inform who you are today?

To celebrate publishing our two-thousandth writing prompt, spend some time this week jotting down a list of the most significant milestones of your life so far. Reflect on both traditional milestones, such as school or education-related achievements and relationship or family developments, as well as other hard-won goals that might be related to creative pursuits or something considered unconventional. You might also choose to focus on an important event that occurred unexpectedly and set your life in a new, progressive direction. Write an essay that expands upon one or more of these milestones. In what ways has your outlook on life evolved over the years, from before the event, immediately after, and then many years later?

What does a Bill look like? What about a Michael? As the U.S. primary election season progresses, an innocuous excerpt from Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s 2012 memoir, Can’t Is Not an Option, has resurfaced on social media and news outlets. In the book, Haley writes that when she began dating her husband, he went by his first name Bill, but she decided that he didn’t look like a Bill and found his middle name Michael suited him better, and he became known as Michael. Write a personal essay that revolves around your sentiments about your own given name. Have you ever thought about changing it? Do you think you’ve taken on certain personality traits because of it, or in spite of it?

Journalist Zahra Hankir’s book, Eyeliner: A Cultural History (Penguin Books, 2023), traces the lineage of eye makeup from its ancient Egyptian origins to contemporary times, zigzagging across a wide-ranging swath of globalism, fashion, and celebrity—from Nefertiti to Amy Winehouse—while relating the implications of the cosmetic accessory to themes of feminine performance and Orientalism. Choose an accessory or stylistic embellishment that has played some role in your own life, or perhaps one that is culturally pervasive or resonant. Consider your relationship to this seemingly frivolous item and write a personal essay about its relevance and connection to your identity. How might you connect the dots to larger social issues and historic moments in time?

Two iconic personifications of the passage of time frequently appear at the start of a year: Baby New Year, a diapered baby wearing a top hat and sash displaying the upcoming year, and Father Time, an elderly bearded man often accompanied by a scythe and an hourglass. As we’re all pressed to return to work with renewed energy and begin the year with replenished resolve, take some time to reflect on the endings that coincide with these beginnings and write a personal essay on the theme of conclusions and closure. What routines or activities do you turn to that help bring you closure?

In his sardonic essay “Santaland Diaries,” a reading of which NPR airs every year as a holiday tradition, David Sedaris tells the story of how he, as a struggling writer, spent a season working as a Christmas elf at Macy’s department store in New York City. In one scene describing the Santaland Maze, Sedaris channels the frustration and dark thoughts many retail workers experience during the holiday season. “I spent a few hours in the Maze with Puff, a young elf from Brooklyn. We were standing near the Lollipop Forest when we realized that Santa is an anagram of Satan. Father Christmas or the Devil—so close but yet so far,” he writes. Dip into the dark side of the holiday spirit and write an essay about a year when you experienced a particularly frustrating holiday season. Consider the feelings of stress and cheer that are often at odds at the end of the year.

Last month, musician André 3000, best known as one half of the Atlanta hip-hop duo Outkast, released his first solo album, New Blue Sun. The instrumental jazz album features the artist playing flute on songs improvised in real time, a surprising turn for fans of the renowned and reclusive rapper whose last album with Outkast was in 2003. In a recent GQ video interview, the music legend speaks about authenticity as a creator and how he doesn’t feel compelled to rap about anything in his life. “I’m forty-eight years old,” he says. “And things that happen in my life, like, what are you talking about? ‘I got to go get a colonoscopy.’” Write a personal essay about how your own literary output has evolved over the years. How can you connect your creative predilections and urgencies at specific times in your life with the state of your physical body or physical space?

Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija has a long history of rejecting traditional art objects and instead, cooks and serves food in museums and galleries as a way to construct communal environments and reconfigure the concepts of artmaking and art spaces. How do you view the intersection or overlap between everyday life activities and art? Write a personal essay that explores your own perceptions of how writing and other creative pursuits overlap with your daily living. What art or creativity can be found in the simple act of brushing your teeth or commuting to work? Are there larger themes, such as community, interpersonal relationships, identity, consumerism, and pleasure, that float to the surface when you examine the roots of mundane habits and routines?

In an essay published in New York Times Magazine’s Letter of Recommendation series, Ali Jaffe Ramis writes about her love for web browser tabs, which she sees as her own personal curated Internet. “These tabs reflect what’s on my mind. They contain my agenda and provide answers to the mundane questions that demand my attention,” Ramis writes. Select a handful of tabs you have open right now on your computer or cell phone (or if you don’t have any open, pick a few selections from your browser history). Based on your findings, piece together a series of memoiristic anecdotes that recount your Internet browsing tendencies, and then perhaps continue on to expand upon how each specific web page reveals something about your current mindset, or your past or future selves.

In his 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche,” translated from the German as “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud describes and examines the concept of uncanny or eerie feelings and how they can be expressed in the presence of a doppelgänger or a doubling. In this situation, something unexpectedly recurs—a repetition which may seem random, but when given context, takes on significance or meaning. Write a memoiristic anecdote about a time when you observed or experienced an unsettling recurrence. Perhaps you saw, in a short amount of time, the same number, person, or chain of events. Or perhaps you were wandering aimlessly and found yourself on the same street again and again. How were you able to break out of the cycle of duplication? Does it still creep into your mind at inopportune times?

The manifesto is a form that many writers, artists, philosophers, and politicians have used for centuries to publicly declare the intentions or ideologies behind their practice. Some influential artist manifestos include Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky, in which he argues that painting is an expression of the artist’s inner life; The Laws of Sculptors by artist duo Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore, which argues against the intellectual and economical elitism of contemporary art; and William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s introduction to their collection Lyrical Ballads, which marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. Inspired by this form’s rich history, write a manifesto that declares why you write and what you hope to accomplish through your writing.

“When I was twelve, I saw a terrible movie called Devil Girl From Mars. And I turned off the television and said to myself, I can write a better story than that. I sat down and began writing my first science fiction story,” says award-winning science fiction author Octavia E. Butler in a 1993 interview for BBC News. Butler, whose work has recently made a resurgence with multiple television and film adaptations, expanded and revolutionized the science fiction genre by writing from the perspective of a marginalized Black woman and celebrating her voice. Is there a film, book, or work of art that you encountered in your childhood that inspired you to start writing? Write an essay that reflects on the impact of this work. Whether through resistance or celebration, how can you trace the development of your artistry back to this first encounter?

In a profile of Annie Dillard by John Freeman, published in the March/April 2016 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author demonstrates the generosity she is known for as a writer and mentor by speaking about how working in a soup kitchen can benefit a writer. “There are many unproductive days when you might hate yourself otherwise,” writes Dillard in a correspondence with Freeman. “You are eating the food, using the water, breathing the air—and NOT HELPING. But if you feed the hungry, you can’t deny you’re doing something worth doing.” Write an essay about a time in which an act of service added meaning to your creative practice. How did this intimate exchange help fuel you as a writer?

In “Singing Into the Silence of the State,” an essay from Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf Press, 2023) by Roger Reeves, who speaks about his first book of prose in our September/October 2023 issue, many unanswered questions are posed to the reader. “What is the song that can be sung to soothe a fretting child in a bomb shelter?” writes Reeves. “What is the necessity of singing during catastrophe, whether State-created or virus-induced?” Through these questions, Reeves considers how to console his young daughter, himself, and the reader while in the midst of social unrest and a pandemic. Try writing an essay that begins and ends with a question. What are you asking your reader to consider and how can you offer consolation through this shared questioning?

In his 1958 memoir, The House of Life, translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson, critic and scholar Mario Praz catalogues the objects found in the apartment in Rome where he resided for thirteen years. As an avid collector, Praz describes the furniture, pictures, and knickknacks he possesses, all of which have value in his eyes. Each object reveals more about his interior life as Praz connects them to the people he has met and loved. A rose embroidered on a sofa cover triggers the memory of his wife leaving him; he recalls wearing amber beads and an eyeglass when meeting renowned British designer William Morris’s daughter. Inspired by this unique work of literature, write a spatial autobiography of the objects in your home. Take your reader through a tour of your favorite things while weaving into your essay all the memories attached to them.

In the fall of 1997, Deborah Tall and John D’Agata, then the editor and associate editor of Seneca Review, respectively, began publishing what they called the lyric essay, pioneering the popular essay form. Tall and D’Agata discussed the appeal of the lyric essay, writing: “We turn to the lyric essay—with its malleability, ingenuity, immediacy, complexity, and use of poetic language—to give us a fresh way to make music of the world.” Inspired by their definition of the lyric essay as a form that gives “primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information,” revise a forgotten draft of an essay and turn it into a lyric essay. Try to move by association and connotation, integrating gaps and lyrical language to help the essay bloom.

In her essay “On Killing Charles Dickens,” published in the New Yorker, Zadie Smith recounts her relationship with the timeless author and his influence on her historical novel, The Fraud, forthcoming from Penguin Press in September. In the essay, Smith begins by describing her resistance to writing a historical novel and discusses the unavoidable influence of Dickens on her childhood and her research. Ultimately, she concedes to his influence and tells herself: “I know he often infuriates you, but the truth is you never could have written this without him.” Consider a writer who has had a powerful influence on your writing and start an essay about your relationship. Do you find it necessary to concede to their influence?

“I want to make a praise of sleep. Not as a practitioner…but as a reader,” writes Anne Carson in her essay “Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep),” which appears in her book Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (Knopf, 2005). With careful research and introspection, Carson writes about all the ways writers discuss sleep in their work, uncovering her own fraught relationship to it along the way. The essay combines the forms of literary criticism and personal essay—offering close readings of the works of Virginia Woolf, John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, while burrowing deeper into emotions. Inspired by Carson’s mixing of forms, choose a topic that eludes you—perhaps dreams, fashion, or love—and write a personal essay that uses research to gain a deeper understanding of it. What will you praise?

In the foreword to Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology, published by Sarabande Books this week, editor Joy Priest recounts driving from Provincetown, Massachusetts, to Houston at the height of the pandemic in the summer of 2020. At one point she stops in Richmond, Virginia, and drives down Monument Avenue with “its parade of Confederate statues lining the street’s median,” and later, in Louisville, Kentucky, notes how “the streets were filled with smoke, flash-bangs, and tear gas, not just over the murder of George Floyd but also over the murder of one of our own by Louisville police: Breonna Taylor.” Write an essay structured around a road trip in which the places you visit are central to the essay’s subject. Consider the history of the places you have visited as well as the encounters you have had there.

National Best Friend Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated on June 8 in the United States and Canada. The holiday has no official designation nor any real origin; in fact, according to a 2015 Washington Post article, this hashtag holiday likely began with the website EarthCalendar.net, which takes submissions to catalog “lesser-known holidays.” National Best Friend Day eventually caught the eye of morning TV shows, flower delivery services, and even the American Kennel Club which helped bring it to the mainstream. In honor of this invented holiday, write an essay about the best friends who have come into your life. From your childhood recess buddy to your work bestie, try to communicate what makes each one distinctly special.