This Week’s Writing Prompts-Feb. 25-March 2, 2016

Daily Prompt #1

At the Florida retreat, Carmela Pedicini had a great idea for me: to give a daily prompt or inspiration on this site. Let’s see how many days in a row I can keep this going. Today is Day One:
“We lop away, that bearing boughs may live.” William Shakespeare. Take that, editors!

Daily prompt #2
Study your pet, or some other animal, and take a moment to really see them, as if you were drawing them. Try to see the soul of the animal. Write the portrait.

Daily prompt #3
From all the spaces between times,
from all the gaps in soldiers’ ranks,
from cracks in the wall,
from doors we did not close tight,
from hands we did not hold,
from the distance between body and body
when we didn’t come close to each other––
the great sprawling expanse adds up,
the plain, the desert,
where our souls will walk, hopeless, after death.
-Yehuda Amichai

Daily Prompt #4
“The religious traditions were in unanimous agreement. The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God’s name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test.”

-Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase

Daily prompt #5

Apply “bum glue.” Right now: whip out your pen and write down ten thing you or one of your characters) love(s).

Daily Prompt #6
“The workers, both men and women, seemed to be enveloped in a bitter indifference; even when they laughed or shouted insults they seemed remote from their very laughter, from their voices, from the swill they handled, from the bad smell.”–Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name, p. 461.