Beyond Writing Prompts / A Better Way / Hundreds of Memory List Questions

Why Writing Prompts Don't Work

"Write about when you were 16," the writing prompt urges, but you wonder, "What about when I was 16?" You feel no insistence. Instead, you turn to How to Go Beyond Writing Prompts and peruse its suggestions. You find in the Teen Years section, "How did you describe 'best friend' then? Did you have one? Describe this person and state what it was like to be with this person. If you did not have a best friend, describe how that felt." As you see, this is so much better than a writing prompt.

THE TROUBLE WITH WRITING PROMPTS

Writing prompts with their closed-ended questions tend to lead to isolated stories.They are not, by and large, searching for the meaning lost in the morass of your memory, for the contact lens that is lost in the grasses of your psyche. No…

The problem with writing prompts is they lead to stories that can so easily miss the energy of a life—your life. They are dams that hold back lifestories from overflowing into the present, stimulating cues that don’t force you to consider what happened at those moments that no concocted prompt will detect.

It’s not that writing prompts may not sometimes be pleasurable to write or that a person may not enjoy sharing them or be grateful for a recaptured memory. It’s that they come to you from someone else.The problem is that they are not from within your lifestory.

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THE MEMOIR NETWORK WRITING SERIES

Whether you are writing a memoir, creative non-fiction, or fiction, the suggestions in this book—as those in the other books in The Memoir Network Writing Series—are applicable.

Don't Let Writer's Block Stop You shows you how writer's block CAN teach you to push beyond stuck.
How to Go Beyond Writing Prompts gets you rooted in the meaning of your stories. Gone the isolated or irrelevant stories produced by prompts.
Write to the End / Eight Strategies to Thrive as a Writer offers a number of techniques and best writing practices to keep you writing.
Memory List Question Book: 100s of Not-a-Prompt Questions. Meaningful questions / topics / ideas that help you to reflect more deeply on your story.
Start Your Memoir Right is full of practical steps: stop asking yourself if you should write your memoir, find inspiration to begin, and learn techniques of the art of memoir writing ... you can success.
Writing Great Memory Lists. Memory Lists are the magic bullet of memoir writing. Recall more details and dates than you had ever thought possible.
Write to the End / Eight Strategies to Thrive as a Writer will help you to complete your writing projects and reach the audiences you deserve.