Why I Write to Timed Prompts

By Barbara Krasner

During my MFA years, I prayed that each graduate and faculty lecture I attended wouldn’t require real-time writing. I needed time and space to think, after all. If speakers offered prompts, I doodled instead.

But after earning my MFA in 2006, I didn’t, couldn’t, write for a year. I felt completely burned out, especially from a workshop where my writing was torn apart by peers jockeying for position with the instructor. Everyone’s writing limped along as sacrificial lambs, not just mine.

Then someone I knew from my hometown invited me to a session of the Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) method. We met in a member’s fourth floor apartment in a city walkup, sat in comfy chairs, sipped on water, and wrote in lined notebooks to the facilitator’s timed prompts. The facilitator wrote along with us. She gave us a prompt to write about our writing space. What, a prompt? No way. But then images filled my mind’s eye. I wrote what I saw. The words flowed from my pen and my shoulders relaxed, my breathing grew easier, even after a full day’s work at a job I hated. These two and a half hours were for me. This was my time.

I don’t recall now all the exact prompts from that first night, but I do remember thinking as I drove home, “I wrote an essay today. I wrote an essay today.”

Fast forward nearly twenty years. I am still writing with that group, although since COVID we’ve gone online with Zoom. One night last summer we received a prompt to write about a car experience with a specific vantage point. I had just come back from Europe and thought about the taxi ride I took in the Brussels suburb of Anderlecht to trace the steps of a friend who’d been a hidden child during World War II. Now with the prompt, I thought about my backseat position, and that gave me the necessary angle I needed for the essay, later published in Collateral Journal. Over the years, I’ve penned and published essays, novels in verse, poetry, and fiction with the help of my AWA prompt sessions.

In 2013, I earned my certification as an AWA facilitator. I lead workshops in Writing the Past and Writing Family History. I engage as a participant in other groups: one, for instance, focuses on long form. We’ve been writing together every Friday night for three years.

Why this method works for me:

1. The prompts surprise me into writing from perspectives my left brain hadn’t considered. It’s a space where I can experiment with form and content.
2. There’s no commitment to long writing periods. Most prompts are to write for 20 minutes or less. That’s enough time to enter the cave and come back out relatively unscathed.
3. There’s no hierarchy. The leaders also write.
4. When we read aloud, which is optional, feedback (also optional) can only respond to what’s memorable, striking. No negativity. That was a welcome change from the traditional workshop.

This month is the annual AWA fundraiser with plenty of opportunities to write. I’ve an idea for an essay about my paperhanger grandfather and I’m looking forward to prompts to help put the narrative on the page in unexpected ways. Maybe even a hermit crab essay. I’ll see where the prompts take me.
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Barbara Krasner’s writing explores social justice and displacement. She is the author of three novels in verse for young readers, and numerous essays, short stories, and poems that have appeared in Cimarron Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Consequence, Nimrod, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies from Gratz College. She lives and teaches in New Jersey. Visit her website at www.barbarakrasner.com.