Why Use Prompts

Sometimes prompts are exactly what we need because there is something inside us wanting to be known, and we aren't sure how to shake it loose. A prompt comes from outside of us. In a sense it's a kind of magnet. It draws something out of us that has been inside of us wanting to be known. And we don't have to be aware of it. We don't have to form an idea of it first. We can allow it based on an internal freedom we are granting ourself by accepting the challenge of the prompt.

This is how Maria Irene Fornes taught me to write. To specifically embody myself, to arrive in presence, and then to listen to what she was providing as a prompt, and to use it! She would provide prompts throughout the writing time in her workshop, interrupting us at intervals to give us a line of dialogue or a stage direction to incorporate. She even gave us lines from her own plays sometimes. This freed us to learn to allow shift, to allow the strange, to allow anything to change things up, to be loose with the work instead of hunched over it defensively, to see what would happen if there was a change in the weather all of a sudden. Because life doesn't make sense. And stories don't have to be linear or iterative. I fell in love with prompts and the feeling of not knowing what I was about to write.

When I signed up for Aaron Sawyer's Red Theatre in Chicago Prompt-a-Day for November 2017, I didn't know I would write a full-length play called FUKT. I followed the prompt: self as villain, break the fourth wall.

While writing FUKT I didn't have to worry about what my play was about or how to fulfill some idea I had about what I wanted to write. All I had to do was respond to the prompt. The first draft was written in 7 days and read in public on the 9th of November. I subsequently revised the play to make it more of what I felt it wanted to be, but it was mostly a lesson for me in listening and responding.

I couldn't have written FUKT if I had set out to write it. I couldn't have written it if I tried. Like Yoda says, "there is no try." A play is about doing, why they call the do-ers "actors."

If you are stuck in a story with your writing, whether it's a stage play or any other kind of writing, if you can write the action, what happens next, you can unstick yourself. Action has a way of leading to another action.

I don't mean activity. A mom and a daughter can bake a cake together, but the action of the scene is to reveal something to mom without upsetting her because the daughter wants her support. The activity is cake-baking. The action is to get support. The making of the cake can become a metaphor for the action. But it isn't the action itself which comes from the needs of the characters.

Of course there is the risk of failure. And it's fascinating to watch a character try and fail. Actions don't need to succeed. But in the writing, it's the doing, the ongoing act of trusting oneself to keep on putting marks on the blank page that wins the day every day. Because you can't revise nothing.

Come to Brave Space for prompts that will meet you where you are.