(Daily writing prompts are posted Monday through Friday at 7am on Facebook. This is the weekly roundup with a few excerpts from my personal journal. The goal is to write for at least 10 minutes without stopping, regardless of what ends up on the paper. Feel free to share writing in the comment section. Write on!)

Note: I can’t believe it’s already been 4 weeks already! I’m trying to find a way to get these emailed each week but for right now they’ll just be sent on Fridays with the weekly letter and posted here. And still daily on Facebook. Would love to read some of what you are writing. Feel free to copy and paste in the comment section.

Prompt 16: Today’s writing prompt is from my friend poet Maya Stein’s book: Writing Prompts for Ordinary People (90-Days). Pick one of the three prompts listed:

CORNERED
KNOW-IT-ALL
SALTWATER

From my journal:
“I used to buy this saltwater taffy at the Hammock shops when I was younger. They looked like mini-watermelons or had the image of a strawberry on them depending on the flavor. The images went all the way through the piece of taffy meaning if you bit into them they cross section still had the same perfect image on it. They must have been made in the same way as those sliced FIMO clay necklaces that were also so popular at the time. To make them long strips of color were laid along side each other and into a raw-spaghetti-type cylinder. They were stretched out until the roll was 1/10 the size and sliced into cross sections like a cucumber to reveal the design.”

Prompt 17: Write about the photo below. Describe everything you see: angles, colors, shapes, etc. Find new descriptive words that might not obvious. 

A note about this prompt: Sometimes I push myself to describe things in a photo and I save the descriptions for later use. I file them away in Scriveners under headings like: seasons, houses, people. That way when I am struggling to describe something I always have a trove of them to pull from.

From my journal:
”The door was left wide open as if someone left in a hurry. The shuffle-worn floor planks sagged in the middle and the entire room seemed to bulge outward as if an invisible force pushed against them. A reverse shadow was on the wall where maybe a piece of furniture once sat. Brittle paint followed the grain of the wood. I could write out a poem on the ruled paper of the decade-stained walls.”

Prompt 18: Nursery Rhyme.
From my journal:
Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I. I loved that nursery rhyme growing up. I knew so many. The woman who lived in the shoe, the man that ate no fat, the boy that broke his crown, the pig who went to market. I’m slacking in the parent-child nursery rhyme category, I’m not sure that Sienna knows even 50% of what I used to.

Prompt 19: Collect information today in your journal in list form: quotes, overhead conversations, news headlines, song titles etc.

From my journal:
“Do you know what the adversary is?”
“I was president of the 4-H club.”
Exercise. Ex Er Cise. Eggs are sides. For bacon. Bacon. 

Prompt 20: Who was your best friend at age 5? Age 10? Age 15? Age 20?  (More ideas with a similar prompt at Day 28 of the Lil Journal Project)
Natalie at age 5. Alison and Kerry at age 10. I remember so much about Kerry’s house. We watched Back to the Future when it first came out on VHS. We always played in the woodsy circle across from her house. She had a Rock Tumbler and I wanted one so bad. I still do! Her mother’s house had this awesome loft above the living room with a ladder going up to it.

More posts on writing here:

More on the Lil Journal Project here: