A writing prompt

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Poetry, Prompts.

Take a book you are reading and choose a passage that you like. From that passage, pluck out 25 imagery words that stand out to you. Write something that contains those 25 words.

I did this last fall with my juniors. I wrote while they wrote. We pulled the words from the book we were reading at the time, The Things They Carried.

Here’s what I wrote:

Nalgene, new canteen:
a necessity.
It’s said that our bodies are mostly water,
and water is a symbol of life, of purity,
the deliverer of all things,
so I trek up this loose-rock incline
relying on balance, repetition,
and vanilla cake goo.

Buddha blush in my cheeks,
I stop to drink in the smell of lavender,
tilt my head back to look at the sky,
wonder on the necessity of things.

By dusk, I am home,
fatigued, a killer ache in my legs.
I have not washed the dust off my feet,
because I am ignoring sensibility just now,
like when I was four and used to give my older
brother the silent treatment because it drove him mad.

There’s nothing on TV but premium rubber,
so I fantasize about throwing my shoe at the finger-smudged screen.
Boom. But I don’t.
I click the screen to black, stand up, the burn in my legs
traveling into my spine, up through the top of my head.
My posture’s been rearranged and
I can’t think of anything I can know with certaintly—and that’s the beauty
of this other trek I’m on.

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA in the USA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She has published in Shark Reef, Dual Coast, and Blue Crow Magazine. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.