Writing Prompt: Chords and Cacophonies
For tomorrow’s prompt in the 30-Day Creativity Challenge, we’ll be playing with limitations as a portal to creative discovery. And today’s Wednesday Writing Prompt (sent to all subscribers, paid and free, as a gift) provides something of a preview for tomorrow’s work by exploring the energy and possibility within a single, unbroken sentence.
I first taught today’s prompt last fall, when I discovered Casey Mulligan Walsh’s devastatingly beautiful flash essay, “Still”—which is about her son’s death.
In “Still,” Casey wields one long, undulating sentence to capture the urgency, movement, disorientation, and, yes, stillness of loss. This stunning 500-word essay offers rhythm as its own narrative, a force that amplifies the core truth of a profound experience.
I am awed by the skillfulness and grace with which Casey writes about an impossibly painful topic, how she wrenches beauty from the ache of living and dying, loving and losing, and, perhaps most of all, living and loving onward toward that more eternal truth of who we and our loved ones truly are and will always be. She leans into something beyond mere words and the meaning they hold, which, for some truths, will never be enough. By allowing the actual music of language—its chords and cacophonies—to do a share of the work of telling this story, Casey manages to briefly encapsulate the vast and unending complexity of the human heart in just one line.
That technique is worthy of our attention, and our experimentation. Here’s a detailed, step-by-step exercise to guide you.
Writing Prompt: Chords and Cacophonies
You can begin this exercise by making a list of discrete experiences (definable experiences for which you can identify a beginning and an end point. Try to limit yourself to experiences of short duration—that is, lasting anywhere from 10 minutes to say a couple of days at most. Certainly, the impact of the experience might reverberate into the future, but the experience itself should be contained within a set, brief time period.
Note that you do not need to write about a difficult or heartbreaking topic. You may, of course, but any single, discrete experience will do for this exercise.
Your listed items might sound like:
Kelly's birthday part
The time I got that awful perm
The failed picnic
Mike's sixth-grade play
Spend two or three minutes (set a timer) listing as many discrete experiences as you can think of in that time.
Next, test your ideas for juice. Life is short, so you should (generally speaking but not always) write about what you care most about, whether it’s confusing, mysterious, funny, or heartbreaking. In other words, there should be some fire drawing you into your topic. If that's not happening, try a different topic.
Once you’ve selected the best item from your list to write about, start telling the story of that experience in one scene (250 – 500 words maximum) that spills onto the page in a single, long, breathless sentence.
Use punctuation to keep the sentence clear, of course (commas, semicolons, and em dashes will be essential!). But punctuation is not the only tool at your disposal. You can and should also use devices to create a mood and a movement in the piece. Examples of craft strategies and devices to pay attention to (an incomplete list!) include:
Rhythm
Repetition
Assonance
Alliteration
Rhyme
Shorter and longer phrases
Specific words that create rhythmic or pleasing sounds
Again, you’ll need to punctuate your long sentence, and you are free to do that however you wish, as long as you don’t use periods. You might also choose to do what Casey Mulligan Walsh did, by adding a one word sentence at the very end.
As you write, you should gradually begin to wonder what your scene is really about. And you should try to tease that out if you can. While looking for that core meaning, make sure to not only consider the ostensible meaning of the words you’ve written, but also listen into their sounds. For more on listening, see Monday’s exercise from the 30-Day Creativity Challenge.
Ultimately, keep your piece to 500 words, and, instead of making it longer, focus on making it better. And have fun if you can!
