Writers often use prompts to help them come up with original ways of opening and organizing their work.  Whenever I dip into The Writer’s Idea Book and The Writer’s Idea Workshop by Jack Heffron, I find help for inventing and shaping ideas that I want to grow into finished pieces.  Here are some words from Jack on using his prompts.

Jack:  Let me discuss a couple of my favorite prompts from The Writer’s Idea Book. First of all, I’m especially fond of prompts that help writers deal with focus and shape in their stories.  One prompt I offered in my book is based on an idea that came my way when I worked as an editor for Story Press and writer Michael Martone proposed a book about “appliance fiction.”  Since technology is always supplying us with new devices, he reasoned, encouraging writers to make appliances central to their stories could help them create fresh and original work.  It turns out this device also helps with shape and focus.  I know because the idea intrigued me, and a few months later, I decided to try it.

I wrote “Redial,” a short story about a woman who punches the redial button on her telephone every night upon returning from her late-shift job. By doing this, she discovers that her husband is having an affair.

Sheila: Thinking about that appliance-story premise opens up ideas for other stories.  I think it would be interesting to write about characters who deny their inner problems by focusing on technology:  a coming of age story told by a person whose family has a new computer everyone is battling to use, a story about learning to trust told by a person who has an extensive security alarm system in her house, and a story about having to come to terms with limitations told by a person who never seems to feel limitations as he uses all the bells and whistles on his sophisticated cell phone and other electronic gadgets.

Jack:  Actually, writing this way can also lead to magic realism.  John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio,” is an appliance story in which a radio has magical powers and allows a young couple to eavesdrop on the lives of their neighbors.

Sheila:  I remember seeing an episode in the new Twilight Zone series a year or so ago in which the fiancé of the main character felt the couple shouldn’t have sex for awhile before their vows to make their wedding night really special.  The main character questioned his ability to go without sex and became tempted by a virtual woman who appeared on his computer screen and constantly made cell phone calls to him. I’ve seen TV comedy sketches where people with Tivo, the product that searches for and records the TV programs that its owner will like, have felt imprisoned in the image their Tivo forms of them.  These sketches and plots are using the appliance prompt to good advantage.  I wonder if a story that uses a thermostat with a mind of its own that cools things off and heats things up might prove interesting.

 Jack:  It might.  There’s another way people can use appliances for shaping stories. Martone went on to publish a book called Creating Fiction and used his appliance idea this way: He told writers to research the history of a common device or gadget and pay attention to what motivated the invention.  He said to have a character use this trivial knowledge as he is performing an action.  For instance, a character might narrate the history of the zipper as he is making love.

Sheila:  It seems to me that personal essayists can use this appliance device, too.  They could think of appliances that fascinated them during specific times in their lives and describe how they or others operated the appliances.  Someone might write a poignant description of a beloved grandfather by describing the way he used a blender for various concoctions.  Another person might write a reconciliation story featuring the changes in outgoing voice mail messages.

This idea is taking flight for me:  I also think it would be fun to list the names of people in our lives and the appliances we associate with them and then write a scene in which the person is using the device—from riding lawn mowers to electric toothbrushes to bread makers, the people we know and imagine are busy using things.  And, it also seems to me that an essayist or fiction writer can write about places by concentrating on appliances and machines.  Police helicopters, street cleaners, sand combing trucks, and snow plows are a few machines that I think of when I think of various places I’ve lived.

I feel like I have many ways to start a piece of writing from the appliance prompt, but do you have another prompt that help writers create shapely stories with sharp focus?

Jack:  I think by structuring stories around seasons, holidays, journeys or events we find focus as well as shape.  For instance, in a novel I’m writing, I use the Christmas season as a structural device.  I am writing from the first day of Advent and moving to the Feast of the Three Kings on January 6.

There are many ways you can organize your story using time. You can set your story in a single day like Joyce did Ulysses or over a weekend like Alan Sillitoe does in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.  You can use a season like The Great Gatsby uses the onset of summer to the first leaves of fall.  You can choose a year as Helen Fielding does with Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Sheila:  Here again, I can see the way personal essayists can use the strategies of fiction writers. Here are some titles that occur to me for ways to shape essays according to holidays, seasons, and the calendar:  “A Day in My Mother’s Life,” “Thanksgiving through New Year’s Where I Work,” and “My Year of Arguments” (perhaps for describing life with teens or the events leading up to a break up or the time spent advocating for an ill relative).

Jack: And don’t forget that you can also structure stories as journeys over time.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses a journey structure for its main character who is at he same time experiencing the onset of adolescence.

Sheila:  I guess the personal essayist can create shapely essays by writing about journeys, too—many have journeyed to find out more about ancestors or specific places that haunt us. We have made trips to see new grandchildren or long lost friends or to find new homes.  Journeys of all kinds make for good personal essays, even if they are only journeys around one’s room (à la Louise Bogan in her mosaic autobiography), neighborhood, or place of work.

Jack:  What makes this idea work for fiction is placing the journey in a larger story.  In The Wizard of Oz, for instance, we know that once the group arrives at the Emerald City, Dorothy must still find a way back to Kansas.  Also, in the story the characters experience personal development as the journey continues.  It is a good idea to try a story where the narrative progression coincides with character progression.

Sheila: Applying this to the personal essayist, I’m thinking that journey essays might be organized like this:  The writer describes a journey that coincides with the writer’s inner development and insight.  Or, the writer describes a journey that might be about a whole family or group going somewhere and the way all deepen their relationship as the journey continues.  Or, a journey essay might be about getting lost or unfocused or taking a side journey in the middle of a journey and experiencing more than the writer bargained for.

Jack:  These are all good ways to suggest time’s passage and give a story or essay a frame and focus.  I believe that writing is always an act of hope for an author, hope that he or she will be able to find and declare truths.  Using these shaping ideas should help writers do this, whether through the mind, eyes and hearts of fictional characters or through their own mind, eyes and hearts as first-person speakers.

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I hope you’ll try some of the writing prompt ideas proposed by Jack Heffron.  You are likely to be surprised by what you discover you have to write about when you think “appliances” or “passage of time” or “journeys.” As usual, I’d love to see some samples from people who write using these prompts.