Writing Prompts & Exercises

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.