Whatever our role in life, however well we perform in it, there is always the not knowing if we are doing it right, if what we are trying to accomplish will be accomplished. Sometimes that situation offers us a prompt we can use for writing.

As a writing teacher, I spend many of the minutes of my in-person classes watching the class participants writing from prompts. It is not possible to know for sure that the new prompts I’ve invented will work for creating interesting writing, but that is the hope. One class day, I did some freewriting while the participants were writing from one of the prompts I had invented for that class to try out. I tried to use elements of all my lessons in that prompt:

• have a question in mind (how will this lesson turn out was my question),
• experiment with first, second and third person (this day we were using you, the second person command form),
• use images from your environment
• see what unfolds from not planning where you are going with the writing.

Here is my freewrite:

What the Writing Teacher Thinks

Sit at the head of the long oak table, four such tables, actually, pushed together, two golden oak, one dark mahogany, one painted black. Your students sit three to a side; no one faces you from the opposite end.

Do not look at the cracks between the tables where your best words might escape. Do not look at the three empty chairs. Note that despite the cracks, the tables fit together like one long sentence that shouldn’t end on an ellipsis, those three chairs, one red, one black, flanking the green one.

How the students are writing! And writing.

You hope what they write will be smarter than they are aware they can be. Isn’t it usually like that? You gave them the prompt to occupy their minds so their associations could slip in and keep their words flowing until their fingers are one with the unleashed torrent. The touch of their pens to paper a salve.

You will help your students see and hear the experience they have created on the page, and if you are lucky, taste and smell it, too. But only if you keep your attention from the empty green chair, the black one and the red one, the three students who could have enrolled.

Why didn’t they?

You will meet one or two at the grocery store. They’ll ask how class was, apologize for not being there; they had company coming, kids were sick; they weren’t feeling confident, were afraid to sign up.

Do not look at the green chair and the black one and the red. If you look at the chairs, you will think how the red and the black are sentries beside the green one, how you have hated the word sentries (and sentinel too) in your students’ writing, as if nothing can stand on both sides without calling up guards preventing passage, as if that could ever be good for creating writing, inventing a shape that hasn’t existed before the student wrote from the prompt.

Look at the oak tables, how four become one, how a torrent of words tumbles and spills images that come to rest in an eddy. Perhaps ellipses are not such a bad way to end a table of writers.

What will come next? Who knows? The ten-minute timer still has a few seconds to go…

Your turn:

1. What is a role you play often in your life or a role that is new to you or one that you are only rarely called upon to fill. Make a list. Then choose one. Then formulate a question that you have about our ability to succeed in this role. Without attempting to directly answer this question, write from where you are sitting as if you are giving another instructions. Select images you see around you that seem to feel like they will help you write about the role you are filling (for me it was those tables, the cracks between them, the chairs). As you write further and perhaps ask questions (rather than give answers), your writing might deliver an answer to you about yourself in this role, about what you need to become comfortable with.

2. An alternative way to do this freewrite (but try both ways!) is to think of a person in your life who fills a role that is important to you. Write your instructions to that person. Where are you writing from? For this exercise, choose a place that is not in the usual landscape where you see this person. If you are writing to a doctor, for instance, instead of choosing his office or examining room, choose a campfire setting or a bank where he might be casting a line or a hiking path through a specific woods or to the peak of a mountain. Whoever you are writing to with instructions for whatever role they play, trust whatever place comes to mind and trust the images the place offers you to work with.

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Whether you set a ten-minute timer or a twenty-minute timer or don’t use one at all, my bet is that by the time you are finished writing from these two prompts, you will have fully evoked your situation vis-a-vis your role and the other’s and will have created something surprising on your page.