You read the piece written from a writing prompt to your writing group or post it to a forum and people comment about how clever you are and how important it is to write with humor. “Make things funny,” they say. But… Have you plumbed the memory that would give your memoir depth?

A writing prompt seems like a good idea—but is it really?

You are given a writing based on a writing prompt—let’s say, “Write about something physical you were afraid of as a child?”—and you instantly start to write about the water slide at Camp Algonquin you were sent to as an eight-year old. You are not sure why you are so moved to write this story but you do not hesitate. You write about standing at the top of the slide and about Martha Cocciardi in back of you on the ladder, shouting “Get going, Patty. I want to slide, too” and, at that moment,  you realized there was nothing to be done but to throw yourself at the mercy of fate and hope you survive to enter the fourth grade. You write with some humor and emotional distance suggesting “Oh, silly me! Oh, what little problems we have as children!”

You read the piece to your writing group or post it to a forum and people comment about how clever you are and how important it is to write with humor. “Make things funny,” they say. But…

Have you plumbed the memory of that day at Camp Algonquin, that day that so wanted to be written about when you heard the writing prompt? Have you finally understood what that moment at the top of the slide was about? There was so much more than the slide.

Perhaps you felt betrayed by your parents who had sent you to the camp even as you had told them you did not want to go, even as you begged them to let you stay with Grandma, but your mother had an idea that it was good for you. What exactly did she think was good for you that you can’t now remember? But, you do remember how your mother thought it was good for you not to be friends with Helen McKay and how, later when you were pubescent, she did not tell you that an older girl had died of a botched abortion and so did not help you to understand the dangerous sexual territory of adolescence. She let you wander in alone, unprepared. Your feelings are undefined but strong.

So there you are at the top of the slide with Martha in back of you and your real job as a memoir writer is to ask yourself what was really happening that day at Camp Algonquin and what were the sequellae. As you think of Camp Algonquin, and its slide that was the nemesis of your eight summer, you wonder if was your mother really trying to exorcise something in herself: her own fear perhaps? “Her fear of what?” you ask yourself somewhat impatiently. Why are you making such a big thing of this slide? In spite of yourself but because you feel impelled, you begin to think of your mother, of the things she longed for but did not do, of the things she tried to expurgate over and over again as if it were a sickness that she was struggling with everyday. And you? You think of your own life and begin to sense that you may have been struggling with an infection that came from your mother to you.

Your feeling expands to encompass the times your husband urged you to go on to graduate school, to get the Masters in Library Science that you said you needed but couldn’t possibly find the time to earn. As he speaks, you somehow confuse him with Martha in back of you and you said to him very firmly this time—“Stop pushing me”—but you were really speaking, not even to Martha, but to your mother who had pushed you to go to summer camp without hearing the terror in your voice, who had cut you off from your friend Helen because Helen’s parents were something your mother could not face—was that because they were Republicans or was it perhaps because they were Democrats? Later, your mother had let you go into adolescence without preparing you. You felt that as a betrayal but you had not formulated that feeling of betrayal as a thought at the time your husband was speaking to you. You only thought to yourself, “Don’t betray me by sending me to graduate school!”

You might realize now how, thirty years ago, you passed up your husband’s offer to support you financially and emotionally while you were in school because you were afraid that he was going to betray you, was going to demand that you be something you couldn’t be. So, instead of being the MLS librarian in your city as you so much wanted, you remained an assistant—and now that is a sadness in your life. And you grasp how much energy you have spent in your life struggling against this feeling of betrayal, so much energy squandered that ought to have been spent on an MLS.

This realization was all because of the story of your parents’—your mother’s really—sending you to summer camp, of the memory of you standing at the top of the slide and feeling Martha pushing against you, of you sliding down and feeling the water gushing onto your face and into your nose and mouth.

Perhaps finally, because you have done the inner work that memoir writing is so good at, you understand that it is possible to treat and heal from your mother wound.

This is the real work that a writing prompt too often does not inspire. It is the work that will lead your fellow writers perhaps to say, “But, your writing is so dark!” And you will now be able to say, “Dark and light are companions.” You will be doing the work that finally will get you to understand that you can choose to turn around on the slide and descend the stairs if you wish to or to slide down and learn to play a game that is not obligatory to learn. Your choice.

That is my issue with a writing prompt. A writing prompts tend to lead to isolated stories, stories that are searching for humor, searching to be shared with a group that is perhaps looking for entertainment. Writing prompts lead to stories that can so easily miss the energy of a life—your life.

That said, I must confess to offering my Memory List Question Book—a book of writing prompts—as a bonus for signing up for my memoir-writing e-newsletter —but I do so only with a caveat that you need to do the Memory List first and only then go crack the book open to search for writing prompts. Because…

Sometimes a writing prompt can also be useful.