In The Kindergarten Teacher, a remake of the 2014 Israeli film of the same name, Maggie Gyllenhaal stars as an aspiring poet and elementary school teacher who becomes obsessed with the writing of a five-year-old boy named Jimmy. To craft the young boy’s verses, Gyllenhaal and director Sara Colangelo commissioned poetry from Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong. In the New York Times, Vuong spoke about his creative process, which involved cannibalizing several of his own poems “to shift the complexity from the syntax to images.” This week, rewrite one of your poems so that the voice is from a child’s perspective. Pare down your language and focus on the core images. For ideas, read more about how Vuong adapted his poem “The Bull” to fit the character of Jimmy.
Writing Prompts & Exercises
The Time Is Now
The Time Is Now offers three new and original writing prompts each week to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. We also curate a list of essential books on writing—both the newly published and the classics—that we recommend for guidance and inspiration. Whether you’re struggling with writer’s block, looking for a fresh topic, or just starting to write, our archive of writing prompts has what you need. Need a starter pack? Check out our Writing Prompts for Beginners.
Tuesdays: Poetry prompts
Wednesdays: Fiction prompts
Thursdays: Creative nonfiction prompts
Get immediate access to more than 2,000 writing prompts with the tool below:
“I attempt to discuss, through a conflation of creation myths, the idea of being formed by literature,” writes Paige Ackerson-Kiely on the Poetry Society of America’s website about the title poem in her second collection, My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012), which began as a response to arctic explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s memoirs. “One fact of my life...is that I have often been consoled by books, have found a life for myself within those pages, when that sort of life was not available to me on the outside.” Write a love poem that points to how you have been formed by your favorite books, writers, and literature. How has a particularly memorable work of literature provided you with consolation and love, and helped create an inner vitality?
Since 1886, every February 2, a strange celebrity garners national attention: Punxsutawney Phil, a groundhog with the power to predict the severity of winter weather based on his shadow. The tradition purportedly has roots in an ancient Christian holiday that involves bringing candles to church to be blessed for winter. It wasn’t until the holiday was introduced to Germany, that a small animal and his prognosticative shadow became a part of the tradition. Although there are others, the celebration at Gobbler’s Knob in Pennsylvania is arguably the most popular, and even inspired a movie. For this week’s prompt, think about an unusual ritual or belief among your family, friends, or community. Write a poem about your knowledge of its origins and how it has evolved over the years. What has been lost or gained with time?
One day doesn’t always last twenty-four hours in the universe: A day on Saturn lasts a total of ten hours, thirty-three minutes, and thirty-eight seconds, according to a recent paper published in the Astrophysical Journal. Jupiter’s day lasts approximately nine hours and fifty-five minutes, whereas it takes Venus two hundred and forty-three days to rotate around the sun. Write a poem that explores the idea of a day that lasts not twenty-four hours, but is shortened to just a fraction of that, or conversely stretches way beyond it. How might a distorted sense of time and urgency change your concept of aging? Can you convey this difference with rhythm or the format of your lines on the page?
“Someone was always, always here, / then suddenly disappeared / and stubbornly stays disappeared,” writes Wisława Szymborska in “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanaugh. Although we often think of inspiration in terms of an overheard fragment, a fleeting sentiment, a glimpsed object, a visit from a muse—the presence of some thing—many poets have found inspiration and emotional resonance in emptiness. “Implodes, and all the way to nothing. / To illumine, first, then fades to black. / Hole where light was. / Absent star, perforation in there,” writes Valerie Martínez in the title poem of Absence, Luminescent (Four Way Books, 1999). Diana Khoi Nguyen’s poems in Ghost Of (Omnidawn, 2018) delve into absence by presenting family photographs from which her brother had cut himself out before his death, followed by concrete verse that takes the shape of the excised silhouette or rectangular blocks of text that fill the shape of the negative space. Write a poem that takes inspiration from an absence or emptiness of a person, place, or feeling.
The Humboldt Glacier, located high in the Andes mountain range in Venezuela, is the country’s last glacier. Glaciers are disappearing around the world due to climate change, which has also been a factor in declines and extinctions of animal species elsewhere. This month saw the death of George, the last snail of the Hawaiian species Achatinella apexfulva, named after Lonesome George who died in 2012, the last of the Galápagos tortoises. Write a poem about an object that is the last of its kind to ever exist, either in reality or hypothetically. How is the disappearance of your chosen subject significant in its own way?
Works of poetry composed of tiny glass vials, a mineral collection, a board game, lunch boxes, Rolodexes, and View-Masters? In “Authors Thinking Outside the Box” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, Adrienne Raphel takes a look at Container, a small press founded by poets Jenni B. Baker and Douglas Luman, which teams with authors to publish books in nontraditional forms, oftentimes as a modified object or series of objects. Take a look around your home, a grocery store, or a hardware store for an everyday object that sparks your interest, and compose a poem that could be printed or inscribed onto the object in some way. Take in consideration how the object and your poem relate to one another.
“Whenever I find myself at a literary crossroads, I reach for my Tarot deck. In my regular life, I’m a staunch scientific materialist…but in my creative life, I’m an unqualified mystic,” writes Will Dowd in a 2017 installment of Writers Recommend. In fact, there are many writers who have found inspiration in the Tarot, including W. B. Yeats, Italo Calvino, and Charles Williams. Try your hand at choosing a card to guide you for this week’s poem. Conduct an online search for a card and allow the image to be your muse. Their names, such as Temperance, Wheel of Fortune, the Magician, and Death, may be enough to conjure up ideas.
There is a long tradition of writers waxing poetic about the moon, dating back as far as ancient Vedic texts. Recently, Louisiana Channel asked six authors to discuss the mysterious figure in the sky and why it has such a profound effect on their writing lives. There’s even a word in German, Yoko Tawada says, which literally means “addicted to the moon”: mondsüchtig (translated as lunatic). For this week’s poem, continue the tradition of lunar poetry with your own lines about the moon. If you need more inspiration, read “To the Moon” by Percy Bysshe Shelley or “The Moon and the Yew Tree” by Sylvia Plath.
The Rockettes, who have been based at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall since 1932, are a precision-dance company best known for their synchronized performances during the winter holiday season. Though their shows have evolved over the years as they’ve incorporated innovative new numbers and routines, what has remained unchanged over the years is the spectacle of their precisely-timed, high-kicking dancing. Watch video footage of the Rockettes, or synchronized skaters, swimmers, or line dancers, and write a poem inspired by these performances. How can you replicate the emotion or aesthetic of the repetition and patterns in your poem’s syntax, rhythm, or format on the page?
“Does a voice have to be auditory to be a voice? / where in the body does hearing take place? / which are the questions that cannot be addressed in language?” Jen Hofer has said that her poem “future somatics to-do list,” which is composed as a list of questions, is “a poem that is a to-do list that is a poem.” Write a poem that consists of a series of questions, all revolving around one topic or concern. In what ways do the types of questions, and their progression, reveal both your current state of mind and your hopes for the future?
A 3-D-printed gun, a Nest thermostat, an iPhone, cargo pants and false eyelashes made in factories in South Asia, a Brexit campaign leaflet, a burkini, a knitted pink hat. In 2014, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum introduced Rapid Response Collecting, an initiative that allows the museum to collect and display objects associated with significant contemporary world events in a timely way. The National Museum of Ireland and the Jewish Museum Berlin have established similar programs, acquiring items with recent political or cultural importance, such as campaign banners and protest posters and signs. Make a list of objects or ephemera that have played a prominent role in your life in the past two or three years, including items that have figured into international news. Write a poem in response to a selection of these objects, exploring any emotional ties you have to them and their significance to larger social issues.
“I have always grown up in a world where there were things one did not understand, because there were languages that were not completely accessible,” said Meena Alexander in an interview with Ruth Maxey for the Kenyon Review in 2005. “It just gives you a particular sense of being in a world where you can be comfortable even though linguistically the world is not really knowable.” Write a poem that touches upon something unknown or that you may have misunderstood in the past. With the help of a dictionary or online research, try incorporating words from a language you are unfamiliar with to add to the ambiguity.
The Oxford English Dictionary has announced the 2018 word of the year: “toxic.” Originating in the mid-seventeenth century from the medieval Latin toxicus, signifying “poisoned” or “imbued with poison,” the word has taken on new associations and collocates in the years since—workplace, masculinity, relationship, and Britney Spears, to name a few. This week, read through the list of definitions and origins for this timely term and write an ode incorporating as many of the variations as you can.
The headless chicken monster: the stuff of nightmares or a real scientific oddity? It’s actually the nickname for a deep-sea swimming cucumber recently captured on camera for the first time in the Southern Ocean between Australia and Antarctica, and caught on film only once before in the Gulf of Mexico. Write a poem inspired by this reddish-pink finned creature, taking inspiration from its scientific name Enypniastes eximia, and its other nicknames, such as the headless chicken fish, the Spanish dancer, and the swimming sea cucumber. Take a look at photos and videos to see this unusual creature’s bulbous, transparent body and webbed, veil-like appendages and tentacles moving across the ocean floor.
Struggling to stay motivated? Researchers at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business recently found that people having trouble achieving their goals benefit from the very act of giving advice to others. This week, try offering some advice to someone in a poem. Write a list of suggestions for handling a challenge, perhaps something you know very little about to add some levity. It can be specific, like what to do when your car breaks down on the side of the highway during a thunderstorm, or something more general like how to resolve an argument. Using an idea from your list, write a humorous poem addressed to someone who may or may not appreciate your guidance.
Construction workers renovating a building in Valdosta, Georgia, last week discovered approximately one thousand teeth buried in a wall on the second floor. Historical researchers attribute the discovery, and the teeth found in walls in two other cities in Georgia, to the spaces having been occupied by dentists in the early 1900s. Write a poem inspired by the imagery, secrets, and possibilities evoked by these bizarre findings. How do the buildings and architecture that surround us hold and reveal local history? Have there been situations in your life when a buried past became uncovered in mysterious or revelatory ways?
“I always feel that I’ve seen a thing after I’ve described it….when I’ve written a thorough physical description of something, then I feel like I’ve seen it and I’ll remember it,” says Barbara Kingsolver in “A Talk in the Woods,” her conversation with Richard Powers in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Choose an object that you have never really given much thought to, but that you see frequently in your home or on your commute, perhaps a houseplant or a mailbox or a street sign. Spend some time intensely observing it, and then jot down a thorough physical description. Afterwards, write a poem about the object. How did your perception of it change, in your mind’s eye, after going through the exercise of articulating it in language?
“My process of growing up and becoming has been figuring out that a lot of what I’ve been told is wrong,” says Morgan Parker in an interview with Joshua Wolf Shenk at the Believer on the subject of facts and truth and the literary imagination. “If you have a blank canvas, it’s about the kind of audacity to tell stories for yourself. Poetry is storytelling, in this particular way.” Think of something that you were told when you were growing up that has turned out to be wrong in one way or another. Write a twofold poem that first works to question what you’ve been told, and then moves on to tell a new truth.
“It’s my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk among the hum-colored / cabs,” writes Frank O’Hara in his poem “A Step Away From Them.” So often, we miss out on the potential for inspiration from our daily routines, passing muses on morning commutes, lunch breaks, or evening strolls. This week, read O’Hara’s poem and then go out into your neighborhood with no set destination, carrying a notepad with you. Observe and write down everything and everyone you see: invent background narratives, involve your senses, and record sounds and overheard phrases. At home, write a poem that starts with the time of day (“It’s eight in the morning,” or “It’s my lunch hour,” or “It’s midnight”) and take the reader through the streets with you.
The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering has been convening in Elko, Nevada for over thirty years to highlight the “cowboy way” of life, with activities such as poetry and yodeling and sing-alongs, musical performances, dancing, and recounting tall tales and folklore. Many poems and songs that are performed describe the everyday work of ranchers, herders, and rodeo cowboys, and the wide, open spaces of the rural West landscape. Taking a cue from these themes of cowboy verse, write a poem that celebrates the simple pleasures of a work day, focusing on something mundane that brings joy, perhaps finding a way to incorporate the natural environment. Listen to a cowboy song for additional inspiration.
Here’s a strange question that might get some ideas flowing: Where do spiders and stars overlap? Jumping spiders, whose eyes have tubelike structures akin to Galileo’s telescope, have retinas that can swivel so the arachnids are able to look in different directions without moving their heads. Despite being only a few millimeters long, the spiders have eyes that are capable of discerning the moon, according to calculations by scientists. Use the notion of moon-gazing spiders as a launchpad for a poem that draws together two unlikely objects—a celestial body and an earthly body. You might also find inspiration in John Donne’s “The Flea” or Marilyn Nelson’s “Crows,” which incongruously pair the examination of metaphysical subject matter with a mundane physical creature.
“Now, you are a haze, your body turned to watercolor…. You were always more than metal; you were the dream of the thousands of scientists who built you,” muses science writer Shannon Stirone in her National Geographic essay “Dear Cassini: Why the Saturn Spacecraft Brings Me to Tears.” The essay is a farewell letter to NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which ended its decades of exploration last year with a deliberate plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere. Taking inspiration from the emotional lyricism of Stirone’s sentiments, write a poem to an object of global importance that is now long gone, starting with the phrase “You were always more than….”
Earlier this month a fire blazed through the National Museum of Brazil, endangering and destroying a significant portion of the collection of over twenty million artifacts carefully accumulated since the museum’s founding in 1818. One of the museum’s curators reported that the entire entomology and arachnology collections, most of the mollusk collection, and around seven hundred Egyptian artifacts were destroyed. Browse through some of the photos of the museum’s collections, and choosing one object, write a poem that considers the loss of this irreplaceable artifact. You might decide to research more into its history, or simply let your imagination lead the way.
“This place in which I dream the new body — whole & abiding — // I am reaching for the boy now as warden to both the living / & the afterliving…” Khaty Xiong’s poem “On Visiting the Franklin Park Conservatory & Botanical Gardens” is the basis for an interactive installation currently on view at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Visitors can write poems and messages exploring grief on paper cutouts of plants and animals which are then displayed in the gallery. Draw or cut out a paper template in the form of something from nature, and write a poem within its frame addressing or dedicated to a lost loved one. Does your poem, and the emotions contained within it, take shape in different ways according to the shape of your paper?