Writing prompts with an ancient twist: recently I stopped by the excellent Minneapolis Institute of Art, one of those old-school museums full of art from every corner of the world. An Indiana Jones-style museum. I found quite a number of interesting faces peering back at me throughout the museum – all over the world, we create art that evokes the emotion of a human face, in many forms.
Prompt 1: Fearsome Lion
This guardian lion bears his teeth and guards an entrance. What is he guarding? What is guarded in your work, and who is the guard? Is this sentry at a gateway of some kind, and what is the sentry keeping out or holding in?
Prompt 2: The Movement of Horses
There are numerous horse statues in the museum, many from Eastern cultures. These 2000 year old pieces from China showed an enormous amount of dynamic movement just around the horse’s head. So think about (for our fiction friends) a point in your work where a character seems to be at rest, with no physical or emotional trajectory, and rewrite or write forward so that the character is now in motion – both physically and in the story. If they are sitting on the couch, get them off the couch (or if you have no idea where they are in space put them somewhere, and make them move).
Prompt 3: Romantic ideals
This Renaissance sculpture seems to portray a nymph tussling with Pan, god of the wild. The pure white of the marble is exquisite, even more so in person. A lot of writers these days avoid romantic storylines, lest they be mistaken for “romance novelists”. But one doesn’t have to envision Fabio on the cover to add a little romance, a deeper connection, between characters. Write a scene in which two characters discover a romantic connection for the first time. Then, just for fun, write a later scene, in which the characters break up. You could begin to formulate a plot by trying to connect the dots between the two scenes – what gets them from point a to point b?
