Check out your fellow YeahWriters’ responses, and don’t forget to leave them some love in the comments! Share your response in the Coffeehouse, located both on Facebook or Discord, by linking your blog post, Google Doc, or other file. You can write fiction or nonfiction you may interpret the prompt any way you like, but you must use it exactly as written. Stuck? We’ve gone into detail about unraveling this sort of prompt style in this Technique Toolbox post on setting prompts and combination prompts. This week, your job, should you choose to accept it, is to write a story or essay featuring “compassion” in the setting provided by this photo. The sky is blue with puffy white clouds obscuring part of the horizon.Īn emotion: COMPASSION + a setting: SEE PHOTO Behind the buildings, a steep, sharply pointed hill juts up, and there are other hills in the distance. To the left of the house, a contemporary road curves towards a building, presumably another house.

ID: In the center of the photo, a two-story white house stands alone near the edge of a low cliff overlooking a rocky shoreline. Literary fiction, poetry, memoir, genre fiction, even fanfiction – if it makes you feel something, it’s part of the literary universe.

And this is why literature – the reading and the writing of it – is integral to a compassionate society. This is one of the goals of literature*: to make the reader experience an emotion that is not theirs. While it may be argued that (in the Western writing tradition) there’s no story without a sequence of events, it’s also true that a sequence of events without an emotional connection is hardly a story at all. Even the most mundane story – going to the grocery store, the first day of school, getting lost on the way to a party – can become interesting and unique if it communicates the writer’s emotions in such a way that the reader understands how they felt. It’s a relationship between the writer and the reader, and relationships are rarely entirely devoid of some sort of emotional connection or response, positive or negative. It’s an attempt at connection it’s a shared experience that is ultimately more than the sum of its parts. About how writing – whether fiction or creative nonfiction – is more than a list of events. “I don’t want to tell you what happened,” she says. This month’s issue of Poets & Writers features Zambian writer Namwali Serpell on the cover with an intriguing pull quote.

Poetry writing challenge