Prompts and Reasons ... to Write

There is a woman with the same name as mine who has written 501 writing prompts. I see her name on occasion when I’m on the internet. Today it gave me this yen to put down a few of my own.

The first would have to be "coming home." When you get home after being “out,” there’s a settling in that is conducive to writing (that is if you’re home alone or can go off to your own room for a while).

There was a crossword puzzle question the other day – a three-word alternative to “vent.” It took me so long to get it that I thought maybe the word “vent” was being used as it applies to heating or air conditioning. After I “got it” of course, I scratched my head about why I didn’t get it earlier. The answer was “let off steam.” Coming home feels immediately like letting off steam, and writing is like the whistle of the kettle.

Letting off steam is a creative indulgence, and everyone needs one (or two). You get home. You let off steam. It's letting off steam to take off your work clothes and put on sweat pants and sit down (or okay, go running if you're so inclined). We all have our own ways of letting off steam, even when the steam is just a puff. It’s a sloughing off. Wash your face. Put a few words on paper.

Anyway, that’s a big prompt for me – that coming release of constraints. It's my number two prompt rather than my number one though, since my number one has to be morning. That freshness you feel (if you’re a morning person), especially if you can begin to write before thoughts of the day ahead enter. If you can sit down with nothing on your mind…that’s the prompt.

Then there’s the really troubling states of mind that aren’t the same as letting off steam states of mind ... like the one I’m feeling today for it being the last day with my old guy. Holy cow, I got attached to him, and imagine him being attached to me, and am feeling all those feelings I was afraid I’d feel if I started a job like this, only worse because the situation isn’t hypothetical, and he’s got a cold, and I left him today, lying on the side of his bed listening to a talking book I’d picked out for him, and that he liked, and that I was so pleased he did --. How much I enjoyed pleasing him and appreciated his appreciation! The other day it was for my chili. And another day he called me prompt. He said, “I was just thinking, ‘She’ll be here in a minute,’ and I turned around and there you were.' You’re very prompt.” You could have knocked me over with a feather I was so touched. That’s the way I want to be, want to see myself, I guess…that I’ll be there when someone is expecting me. I hate the feeling of letting him, or anyone down. I feel like shit to tell you the truth. Feeling like shit has definitely got to be high on my list of writing prompts.

I don’t know why, but it makes me feel a small bit better to get it out – to say how bad I feel. Sometimes, you know, if you say it to someone in the next room, they take it the wrong way, as if you – or anyone, can do something about it – or as if you’re regretting the decision you made. It’s a damn shame that you can’t get through life without wanting to be in two places at one time, but there it is. It's not about wishing it could be otherwise. It's about feeling it for your day, week or hour: "Darn. I feel bad about that." Letting everything else wait while you hear and feel your heart. (The Given Self is a lot about that.)

And so you mourn a little in your private way and you say your small, wistful prayers, and you let the image of your old guy lying on the side of his bed rest in your mind’s eye instead of scrunching your eyes tight as if trying to block it out and never see it again, and you just hold on in some loving way. And you write.

Here’s some writing from Sue Monk Kidd that feels comforting just now. There are prompts for writing, and then there are reasons you write. You write for comfort and sometimes it gives comfort to someone else:

“. . . a strange gracing of my darkness . . .”
“I was caught suddenly by a sweep of reverence, by a
sensation that made we want to sink to my knees.
For somehow I knew that I had stumbled upon an
epiphany, a strange gracing of my darkness. . . .
For that was the moment when the knowledge
descended into my heart and I understood. REALLY
understood. Crisis, change, all the upheavals that
blister the spirit and leave us groping—they aren't
voices simply of pain but, also, of creativity. And if
we would only listen, we might hear such times as
beckoning us to a season of waiting, to a place of
being, a place of fertile emptiness.”

Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits