A WRITING PROMPT

 

 

I’ll be teaching another “Gonzo Science Fiction, Chicano Style” class at Summer 2025 Palabras Del Pueblo Writing Workshop (check it out, sign up, it’s be on Zoom). One of the things I am adding more of is writing prompts.

Since I've been busy the last few decades being a writer rather than paying attention to what was going on in creative writing classes, I didn’t know what a writing prompt was. After a while, I figured it out, and am trying to incorporate it into my presentations.

I thought the idea was a bit silly at first. I see the whole world as made up of writing prompts, I go about my business, and run into all kinds of things I take note of. Sometimes they end up as part of a story, but mostly these days I put them on social media across several platforms. 

I’ll be collecting them and using them in my class.

Also, I’ll make part of it about how to create your own writing prompts. You know, that old saying about if you give a man (it’s an old saying, all genders feel included, please) a fish he eats for one day, but if you teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime . . .

It happens to me all the time, like the other day, it had stopped raining, while making my way to my troque to go to work, I had just taken a picture of the glittering drops on a cactus when I noticed, a few door down, a young brown woman in a white bathing suit. This wouldn’t be unusual in the killing heat of the summer, but it was cold. And she was soaking herself down with a garden hose.

As I drove by, it became clear that what I had thought was a bathing suit was underwear, quite utilitarian, with exposed buckles.

Also, I had never seen her or the car at the house before.

Did she get splashed by something, ruining her dress and messing up her car, and she stopped at a random house to clean up?

Was she being pursued by assassins, stopped to change clothes, and triggered the moisture-activated paint to change colors?

Did she drive through a radioactive cloud, and needed to wash away the fallout?

This sort of thing occurs to me when I see something like this.

I can’t turn off my imagination.

The world is my raw material, and I pillage–er,I mean gather constantly.

I am never at loss for ideas, not just for stories (it usually takes about three of these things to make a story), but the little details that make a story come alive. Or maybe I just use them for my social media, or everyday conversation.

My life never gets dull.