Writing Prompts for April

The Lost Art of Paying Attention

Every month I lead an in-person writing workshop in Johnson City, TN, and then share the prompts on substack. I hope they provide some inspiration for you.

April Prompt Theme - Paying Attention

In 2020, Nicholas Carr, a writer who focuses on how technology impacts our brains, lives, and relationships, published a book titled The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. His findings rocked the world quite a bit. The book became a finalist for a Pulitzer. In The Shallows, he describes how the frenetic and fragmented way we are exposed to information in our digital age has physically rewired our brains and made us less and less capable of giving prolonged attention to anything, whether it is something visual or a conversation with another person or even a difficult problem that needs solving. If you’re interested in this topic, he just published in January a follow-up book called Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. So, with that in mind, our prompts today are going to call us to practice the lost art of paying attention.

PROMPT #1 - Paying Attention to Ourselves

Write down these 3 starts to a paragraph: 1. I feel…, 2. I want…, 3. I need…. Now write for 5 minutes about the answers to each of these. Be completely honest. This is for no one’s eyes but your own. Don’t let your pen stop in those 5 minutes. That is important. If you don’t know what to write, just keep writing “I don’t know what to say.” (Thanks to Holly Stallcup for these 3 workshop questions.)

PROMPT #2 - Paying Attention to Objects We Carry With Us

Think about either what stuff you have riding around with you in your car or what objects might be in your purse/backpack. First, choose one of those locations and then just make a list. After you’ve made a list, pick one of those objects and write about its usefulness in your life and anything else you might want to say about or even to that object. You can also adapt this for fiction from a character’s POV if you want.

Reading Extension: One of the reasons that we don’t pay attention to the stuff around us is because we have too much of it. That is a problem for me. I long to be more minimalist, but I guess I lack the will to make that happen. One of my favorite books speaks to simplifying what we need— Journeys of Simplicity: Traveling Light by Philip Harnden. It looks at a set of real people and fictional characters and catalogues what they take with them on the journey of life. There are entries for the cell of Father Zossima (Russian monk in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov), the writing tent of Annie Dilliard, and the long journey of Bilbo Baggins (Tolkien’s lovable hobbit).

PROMPT #3 - Paying Attention to Objects We Have Abandoned

I assume we all have at least one junk drawer. French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes said that the main purpose of having a junk drawer was this— “to ease, to acclimate the death of objects by causing them to pass through a sort of pious site, a dusty chapel where, in the guise of keeping them alive, we allow them a decent interval of dim agony.”

So, let’s again try to make a list of everything in our junk drawer or the junk drawer of a fictional character. Then select one object. With your mind’s eye, take it out of the drawer and really examine it. Write down a detailed description, then write about how it came to be in your house and then in that junk drawer. You can write about when you have used it or why you haven’t. You could write a letter to it. You could write a dialogue with it. You could also put it in conversation with another object in the junk drawer. Pretty much any deep dive you want about what Barthes says is something we are pretending to keep alive in a “dusty chapel.”

Reading Extension: To think more deeply about the objects around us and the art of paying attention, I recommend these two poems: “The Patience of Ordinary Things” by Pat Schneider; “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver