Wolf Hall One Word Writing Prompts
Lists and verbs will carry you many a dry mile. --Mary Oliver
The new year has brought new reading: The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky with my family and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel with
the lovely readers at . Neither book falls into Tolstoy’s small, discrete chapters, so the week feels a bit wonky. Maybe this will iron out?I’ve made a list of writing prompts for myself using the first few chapters of Wolf Hall and thought you might like to use them as well.
I use these prompts in my daily writing so that the blank page isn’t quite so blank. Most of the words are stripped of their context. You don’t need to be reading Mantel to use them—though cardinal and wolf are on the list! (Wolf was today’s word in fact…I wrote about the dark sky and January’s Wolf Moon.) One word prompts pair gloriously with Summer Brennan’s Five Things Essay.
The list of simple words gives me a place to start, the finest tether to remind myself of what I want to be doing.
And I’ll leave you with one more list. This one is a bit more expansive. Sort of puts me in mind of Sister Corita’s 10 Rules. It’s a poem called “The Vostok Ice Core Gives a Creative Writing Lesson” by Nancy Campbell. You can find it online, but I made you a pdf in case you want to print it out and tack it to your wall.
What are you writing this week in the dark of the Wolf Moon?
Oooh. I love these one word prompts.
Here's one for Narrow
narrow
February, you are a narrow month.
You do not sprawl like August, May, or October,
like January, March, July and December;
but perch, quietly, like a slim volume of modern poetry,
daring me to take you down, leaf through your pages
and dive deep into a poem
Break through the frozen crust and
deep deep down into the mud, burrowing to where cold life lurks
like a stone but not a stone
like a stone that will wake with the spring
stretch, breathe, rise, to bask in the new light of a new season.
I like this idea! And yes, Wolf Hall has been very difficult to divide into weekly sections. We're just going to have live with wonky I think!