As readers of the blog know, I’m not a great fan of using a writing prompt. Sure, they get you to writing something and many will insist, “Writing something is better than writing nothing…”

Writing prompts lead to nothing

As readers of the blog know, I’m not a great fan of using a writing prompt. Sure, they get you to writing something and many will insist, “Writing something is better than writing nothing…”

Well, I’m not so sure of that. Writing should matter. It’s hard work, and life is short. What’s better than nothing about writing some text on “the most fun things I did this summer?” as we sometimes had to in school. (No wonder we did not learn to write while in that context!)

Writing from insipid prompts is not much better than writing nothing—not if you are someone who is interested in writing “from the inside out” as I hope all readers of this newsletter are.

This is better than a writing prompt.

Most people begin to write from any of the following:

• A story that wants to be told
• Their Memory List
• Some dialog that is in their heads
• Some recurring idea

In a real sense, of course, all of these are writing prompts, but they are prompts that come “from inside out.” They are based on some feeling, on some visceral urge to write this over that.

What I’m about to discuss in this post are life experiences that themselves don’t need to be included in a memoir but that trigger memories of experiences that ought to be. The other day, for instance, I was thinking about a conversation I had with some people that served as a great writing prompt.

First, a back story

We were at a party, and some of the guests had brought musical instruments. A few of them were speaking about how much fun it was to play especially to be jamming with others. They were making plans to jam together in a while.

I sat to the edge of this group, not speaking. Then, someone, perhaps noticing my silence turned to me and asked if I played anything. When I responded, “No,” they conceded that not everyone plays an instrument and “Hey, we need someone to lay back and enjoy the music.”

Knowing that I was not going to stay to listen to them I said, shrugging, “I don’t enjoy music very much.”

You would have thought that I had exposed myself or had revealed that I needed to leave to go beat my wife!

I added that I wasn’t very musical—and understatement because I am so totally not musical.

“But, you liked the Beatles,” someone said. Wow, he was invoking the big guns!

“I didn’t dislike them,” I said, “but I didn’t buy albums or ever try to go to a concert if they were touring the country.”

There ensued some conversation about hearing major groups.

So far the conversation had been pleasant enough, but when I said I didn’t much like listening to music, I could sense their disbelief—and perhaps even their disapproval.

The fact is that I am not at all musical—perhaps in the same way that I don’t speak Bulgarian. That is, music is simply not part of my life. In the car, I almost never listen to music. If I am driving alone, I always listen to spoken words. If I ever I am listening to music, I notice the words and not the tune. I don’t hear melody. I hear the regularity of the beat well enough but I can’t hear the difference between a three-beat waltz and a four-beat foxtrot or swing. That means I also have much trouble picking up the tempo.

The first beat is a concept, not an experience. I will count the beats—one, two, three, four—but I have little sense of the first beat and start counting from any beat I hear. My late wife used to set me straight by identifying the first beat so that I could begin leading when we danced. She’d say, “One.” I’d count two, three four. Sometimes I would initiate movement at the next occurrence of what she called “one” but sometimes she would have to say “One” again. And I would count two, three, four once more before commencing on the “one.”

Set in motion, I would be more or less fine. Every once in a while, I would get off beat and she would tell me so and I would stop and start once again on her cue of “one”. In spite of this problem, I really enjoyed dancing. It was an experience that had little to do with tune, melody, harmony etc. The team that my wife and I formed looked good enough that, every once in a while, if we were in a group where no one could dance well, we were asked if we had been professional dancers.

Hardly.

My destiny was to love to go out dancing, but my fate was to be unmusical. It was and is a great sadness in my life. It has separated me from a generational experience. As everyone reading this knows, music has very important globally to people in the latter part of the 20^th century.

Back in the day, in my early twenties, I came to realize that music which my peers so reverenced was an exhausting and discouraging experience for me and I gave up going with my peers to concerts, pretending that I had favorite groups (I didn’t), wanting to be more musical, etc. Today, I am fairly oblivious of musical groups from my youth that so many of my generation of the sixties remember so fondly.

That evening at the party, the people with musical instruments began to jam. I could discern songs that had been popular—by the words, not the tune. I went outside where there was a bonfire and had a lovely conversation with two friends as people played and sang inside.

Now back to how to use this for a memoir prompt

Back home, I was moved by this scene wherein I had been “made to confess” how unmusical I was. It felt a bit like I had said something as unsavory as “Of course, I’m into child pornography.” What kind of person was I anyway not to enjoy music!

I began to think of all the times that I had had unpleasant experiences around music (I’m not saying traumatic here—just occasions when music was the source of unpleasantness).

• Having a piano teacher tell my mother in front of me how “it’s not that I don’t want to take your money but you are wasting it giving him lessons.”
• Having a grade-school teacher tell me to mouth the music as the rest of the class sang.
• Having a high school classmate who was assigned a spot next to me in chapel ask me how come I couldn’t sing. Would I mind being quiet?
• Having to take solfège (sight singing) in high school and for the world of me having no sense of the difference between do and me and sol. I could usually tell the difference between the low do and the high do. But, if the teacher blew a note and asked me to identify which was the la and which the ti—forget it. Might as well ask a blind man for the difference between turquoise and mauve

The list of unpleasantness could go on, but here is just one more memory When my minister’s-wife mother-in-law asked me if I would like to attend her church and possibly join, I told her I could never be comfortable in a religious group that placed so much emphasis on group singing, sitting there week after week, surrounded by something I would not be able to participate in.

“But, singing is praying twice,” she responded.

Not for me. It’s a purgatory.

It was a great disappointment to me when the Catholic Church introduced congregational singing in the sixties and changed the reverence of the quiet Mass.

How would I use these memories in a Memoir?

What I would do—and did—was go back to the memoir I am currently working on and insert these experiences. It was easy to place the vignette about my pew-mate asking me to be quiet. It became something small in the overall memoir. A large number of slight distinctions can create a memoir character that is distinct.

Essentially, I created a topic-specific memory list and then used the list to round out portions of my memoir. This was truly writing “from the inside out.”

And how do you know if you have a writing prompt?

Just say someone says something to you that makes you feel uncomfortable. You can think of other times you felt this way around someone speaking to you in this tone or with this content. Make a memory List. Insert these into your memoir.

These are memory prompts of sorts but not phony ones like: “Make a list of all the cars your family owned when you were a child.” This is not bad for details in a memoir, but Memory Listing around a feeling you have just had is so much more “from the inside out.”

And you? Do you have an experience to share that led to a topic Memory List and to an expansion of your writing? How do you use a memory as a writing prompt?  Please share with us below.

*Click here to listen to this post on YouTube.