A Borrowed Idea

A friend of mine recently started a column on her blog where she’s responding to prompts from Monica Wood’s The Pocket Muse II: Endless Inspiration for Writers. The idea is simple yet novel: this is a book full of short writing prompts, images, tips, exercises, etc., so each writing activity provides the perfect prompt for a blog entry. Lee Herrick, who taught my lower division poetry class at Fresno City College, used a similar book for poetry prompts for his students, and I’d always thought that books like these could be endlessly valuable for prompting words and thoughts out of my fingertips. So I’m stealing Malyssa’s idea, only I’ll be using Wood’s first book, The [original] Pocket Muse.

Now I’m not sure how good of an idea it is to commit to a new writing project just before another semester of grad school and teaching begins, but this is why I’ve decided not to promise to readers or myself to do one post a day, one post a week, or whatever x action over every y frequency. Grad students and teaching associates know that this equation can quickly fall apart, and my goal is to have fun with this series, not have yet another source of stress. So I offer no promises, no deadlines, and no worries. Some of my responses may be just a sentence or two. Some may be a poem, an essay, or a scene. Some may be stream of consciousness without revision, some may be highly revised. No limits—no expectations. Just writing.

I’ll be tagging everything concerning this informal writing project as “Pocket Muse.”