Writing Club Assignments

Option A: What is the personal history of your name? How has it been encountered in different spaces? Write a poem that seeks to trace the etymology and personal history of your name.

Option B: Write a personal essay about an uncertain time in your life when a dramatic event caused a shift. Did you lean into the in-between and search for answers or try to ground yourself and move on?

A: Choose an NYT picture prompt and respond

B (from selfpublishing.com): Emotions can be controlled. Thoughts can be stolen. In the world your character lives in, holding on to your own sanity is the difference between destruction and thriving. They must learn to push out anyone who tries to alter their perception of reality.

Option A: Write an epic poem about a challenge you've faced, about living through COVID, about your favorite character, etc.

Option B: Record your own Storycorp story! Watch a few of these awesome little short stories and then create your own!

Option A: Create a "Found Poem." Read a book and circle some words on a page. Use those words to craft a poem. Alternatively, you can cut out words and phrases from magazines.

Option B: What if you mirror started talking to you? What might the mirror say?

Option A: Write about how your main character suffers from a condition that gives them periodic blackouts for seemingly no reason. The only thing they can seem to remember from before each blackout is a bike. A red bike with a white basket and muddy tires. One day, they see that very bike leaning up against their house but this time, they don’t blackout.

Option B: Write about a character who wakes up in a space pod alone…next to a ship so massive it’s actually carrying a planet beneath it. Your character has no memory from before they wake.

Option A: Write about a chance encounter at a cemetery.

Option B: Take a scene from a movie. Insert a character from your own fictional writing into this scene and rewrite the scene in their voice.

Option A: Pick a favorite character from literature, then imagine him/her/them/it at your family's dinner table during the holidays.

Option B: A small ship is sailing around the world with only the captain and a passenger on board. At each port, the captain must leave one passenger and pick up another. Who are these people?

This is completely optional and only for fun! You can also hand in whatever you want for feedback if you have something you already like that's not a response to either prompt. Tell me which option you're doing if it's one of these.

Option A: Write a brief obituary for an inanimate object near you.

Option B: Over the course of the school year, a sixth-grade teacher intercepted dozens of notes being passed between students. He keeps them in a drawer. On the last day of school, he decides to read some of them. What do they say?