Look back at a piece of writing that you did before the pandemic affected your life. This could be as simple as an email that you wrote, something as complex as a contract you made, or it could be something more creative, like a story or poem.
How would you write this text differently now? Perhaps a short story you wrote will now have this news in the background. Perhaps you can add new meaning to a poem because of something you’ve learned. Perhaps an essay you wrote will now include your current experiences.
Rewrite the piece you’ve chosen in a new way, looking at it with today’s eyes.
This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.
Pick one thing that you feel particularly grateful for right now. It could be your dog, chocolate, the snow melting. Anything that has caught your attention and made you feel some gratitude.
Write about it in detail. Why are you grateful for it? What does it mean to you? How has your feeling about this thing solidified or changed? Did you notice this thing in the pace of your normal life? Was it something you took for granted? Or has the way things have slowed down made you see it in a new light? Perhaps it is something you never needed or noticed in the before-times. Or maybe it is something you have always been grateful for. Describe it for us and help us also feel grateful for it.
This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.
Imagine a character (or write about yourself!) thriving during the epidemic. Write their story.
Who is this person? What was their life like three months ago? What did they want for their life then?
How has their life been affected? Are they thriving now because of coincidence, or because of something to do with Covid-19? Are they thriving by chance or have they taken advantage of the situation? What are they gaining? Are their dreams coming true or is it a situation that is wholly different than anything they could have imagined?
What is happening in their lives as the pandemic takes place around them? And how does their story end?
This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.
Write a haibun. A haibun is a mix of haiku poetry and prose. To begin your haibun, go outside (but keep your distance from people!) and write 3 haikus (5-7-5 syllables!) about things you see in nature. Perhaps it is the change in seasons, new growth as snow melts, or the absence of cars. What specific images do you notice? Write haikus about the small things you notice, and try to keep your focus on the concrete imagery.
Then, write prose between each haiku about what the images you used from nature make you think about. Why did you choose these specific images? How do they connect to your life right now? How do they connect to the larger picture of our current times?
This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.
Write about a setting that changes. This could be fictional, or it could be your own setting.
What is your (or your character’s) current setting? Start small, with a bedroom, or an office. Give us the details so that we really feel like we are there. Then think about how this setting has changed in recent weeks. Are there more people around or less? New smells because of your roommate’s new baking obsession? A new makeshift desk in your garage? How has your immediate setting changed and been changed?
Then go larger and larger: How has your house been affected? Your neighborhood? Your town? Your state? Your country? Bonus points if you can then tie back to the small and the personal at the end!
This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.
Create a Written Collage: Think of ten small, concrete things that are different in your life because of COVID-19. You want to choose some things that you can experience with your senses, and that you can describe in exquisite detail.
It could be empty hand-sanitizer bottles, a work project left unfinished, an unused plane ticket, the pile of books you now have time to read, etc.
Describe each one in as much detail as possible. How has this thing changed in recent weeks? What specifically has brought about these changes? How have you noticed this thing in a new or different way?
Arrange your descriptions to create a written “collage” of current life. Look closely at the small differences around you. Together, they tell a story. What’s yours?
This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here.
I don’t know what quarantine has been like for you, but I have spent the last several weeks huddled under the covers, unable to look away from the news, and sanitizing my child like crazy. There has been a great grief, a great helplessness, and the overwhelming feeling that I should be doing something — anything — other than just staying home. I understand that I’m doing my part by hiding under the covers. But it also seems like I should be doing a lot more.
There have been a lot of tears. I might have gotten in a non-verbal argument with my toddler. And the things I say to my plants these days makes me wonder if they think I am crazy. The anxiety is real. And I know it would make me feel so much better to do something for others, to connect with others.
Are you feeling this way, too? Both paralyzed by anxiety and seized with the need to do something useful, something helpful?
Maybe your situation isn’t right to make masks or adopt a grandma, but you do want to do something. I have been wanting to write. I have dealt for years with feeling like writing is selfish, and in this age of unease, it only seemed more so.
But still, I felt that nagging feeling deep in my chest that begged for me to write. Maybe you have been wanting to write, too. Maybe you have been feeling like writing is a luxury right now and something you shouldn’t be spending time on. But I want to push against that idea.
I personally could really only do the work that was absolutely necessary in the past few weeks, and that was teaching. So I started thinking about how I could be useful to the writers taking my course, which also led me to think about how we could be useful as writers.
As my students returned to our little online portal after an extended spring break, I asked them what would be useful for them as writers right now. Overwhelmingly, they wanted to journal about this time and overwhelmingly, they wanted prompts.
I wanted to make prompts that would really be helpful for my students. Prompts that encouraged them be present, to look at the little things, to imagine a better future. But also prompts that allowed them to voice their fears and stare down their anxieties. I wanted to make prompts that they could connect over, draw insight from, and use to document what they saw and experienced. Basically, I wanted to make prompts that were helpful in making my students helpful.
And I thought, maybe it will also be helpful for others, too. So I wanted to share it with you.
Here is the thing: you can help. You can help by writing. Think of all the ways that the writing is useful.
On the most basic level, it is important to have a historical record of this time, and multiple perspectives will be important to get the history right. We need to know what nurses were doing, what patients were doing, what it was like to go to work, and what it was like to stay home. The more information and perspectives that can be gathered will help those in the future see what worked and what didn’t, and how the world changed in response.
Also, taking care of your own mental health is helping. I can’t stress this enough. Look, no one is going to be served by letting anxiety, depression or any other mental health issue take over. Practicing isolation and social distancing are terrible for all kinds of mental health disorders, from anxiety to eating disorders. If writing is making you feel better, you should do it. If it helps you get through the day a little kinder or with a little more ease, it is important, and you are helping others by doing it. It’s also a great way to ease the sense of isolation (see below!).
Think about all the reading you are doing. We are all trying to make sense of what is going on right now. There are numerous conspiracy theories, constant live news updates, and people sure that this will change life as we know it forever. All of these things exist because people are trying to understand a situation so unlike what most of us have experienced. Writing about it is trying to make sense of it. Sure, you might not figure out the answer to the pandemic, but even coming to one little way of thinking about it that is helpful to you might be also helpful to others.
And if you aren’t writing about the pandemic, but are writing something totally unrelated, like ancient alien dinosaur erotica or whatever, you are helping too! People are looking to artists for distraction, for escape, because we can’t exist on high-alert all the time.
This brings me to a last way you can help: share your writing.
Share your thoughts and the ways in which you are dealing with it. There is a need for connection right now, and one of the ways we can connect and still be socially distant is to share our thoughts in writing. So share your writing. Even if it doesn’t have anything to do with COVID-19, it could help someone find a few moments of calm and connection. Maybe you send your mom a letter with one of your journal entries that you think she would like, maybe you share it on Facebook, maybe you share it completely anonymously on a forum. But let other people learn from your thoughts, and allow them to connect back with you. You will both be helped by it.
So this is my small way of sharing with you. You can use this with #NaPoWriMo or #CampNano or on your own, day by day, or when you feel moved. I hope you find this helpful and I hope you also know that you are helpful.
These are some of the prompts that I created for my students. I’ll post a prompt a day and you’ll find a little sneak peak below. I hope that you can use them to be helpful, to yourself and to others. I hope that you can use them to share your fears, your hopes, and your thoughts. And most of all, I hope you can use them to connect.
Thank you for connecting with me by reading this <3
