Writers Wayside

Desert mud in Taos

Last summer, I attended a fiction writers workshop in Taos, New Mexico led by my cousin, novelist Sean Murphy, and his wife, journalist and fiction writer Tania Casselle. It was a lovely long weekend in the dramatic landscapes and historic sites of Taos, where I learned a lot about technique. I’ve made tentative stabs at writing novels for the past 30 years, but have never completed one. In one of our sessions, we were encouraged to jot down ideas for scenes we thought we should write. Instead of just scribbling down a few, I took it to heart and that evening, back in my hotel room, I wrote several pages of scene summaries. Now they’re my prompts. When I can’t seem to find the time or energy to work on the novel, I write more prompts (ala “Newt tries to track down the chickens that disappeared from the wreckage of the chicken coop during the storm.”) Today, I dusted one off, took it to a local coffeeshop, and proceeded to write more nine pages of the novel based on a single prompt. The idea extends to nonfiction, too. When you just can’t seem to focus on getting that assignment written, stretch your mental muscle by writing down prompts for article ideas to research and query later so your well never runs dry.