Weekly Writing Prompts March 20-31

Daily Prompt #20 “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.”– William Butler Yeats

Daily prompt #21 “Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?” -Joan Didion

Daily prompt #22 “Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”-Joan Didion

Daily Prompt #23

‪#‎dailyprompt‬ 24 If you are inclined to feel guilty for writing fiction instead of, say registering voters, or simply planting a garden; or if you are the kind of person who sweats beads of guilt for all the electricity your computer steals from the planet in order to write that novel, consider this: “Realistic fiction, for its part, may expand readers’ circle of empathy by seducing them into thinking and feeling like people very different from themselves…Reading novels about characters unlike oneself exercises the ability to put oneself in other people’s shoes, which turns one against cruel punishments and other abuses of human rights…[think Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Nicholas Nickleby, The Grapes of Wrath…]” -from Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

‪#‎dailyprompt‬ 25 “Basically, here’s my advice: take time.
In your life, you may always feel as if you don’t have enough time. Adults are specialists at feeling that. Strangely, writing seems to give us a deeper sense of our own time and time in general.

What do we need? A quiet minute, a pencil, a page. Please be kind to yourself when you write. Don’t expect you will love everything that comes out–let many things come out, and know that now and then you will like a line or a phrase enough to carry you away. Don’t be stingy!