Here’s a strong cup of hot coffee—a writing prompt to get you writing in the morning, or any time of day. It’s a modified version of an exercise I was assigned in a college class on Human Potentials, a field of study made popular in the 1970s by American author Jean Houston. We explored many capacities that we human beings have, including the ability to observe, in a flash, what we see in front of us. As writers, we know that keen observation is ESSENTIAL!
Eyes as camera shutters
One day our class went outside to a nearby yard, each of us paired up with another student. One student led, the other had closed eyes for a few minutes, until the teacher had us stop. The students with closed eyes were asked to open their eyes very quickly and then immediately squeeze them shut again. The idea was to pretend your eyes were a camera, taking a photograph. After re-closing their eyes, the “camera” students were to describe what they remembered seeing during that “flash” of open eyes.
Close eyes, spin—open eyes, write
A few years later, when I started writing every morning, I made up a version of that exercise. I would do it while alone in the kitchen early in the morning. I shut my eyes and kept them shut while slowly turning around a couple of times—after making sure nothing was on the floor I might trip over. When I opened my eyes, whatever my gaze fell upon first is what I would write about for twenty minutes.
Write what you see
At the time, one item on a shelf in my kitchen was an antique iron my mother bought when she scoured antique stores. I was only a kid then, and it’s one of only a handful of items I have that belonged to her. I treasure having it in sight wherever I live. One morning I did my spinning-closed-eyes-open-eyes exercise in the kitchen—the first thing I saw? My mother’s antique iron. I sat down at the breakfast nook and wrote about the iron’s color, shape, how the wooden handle could be detached and used on another iron waiting on the fire.
As that year went on, I worked and reworked that piece of writing about the iron, eventually shaping it into a poem I titled, “The Bar Iron.” It won second-place in The Tampa Writers Alliance contest, 1996. It was published in Wordsmith ’97, the Anthology of the Tampa Writers Alliance, 1997. Later, I re-titled the poem, “A Shirt Not Her Own.” You can download and read it here: https://charleneedge.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/AShirtNotHerOwn_r1-w-color.pdf
If this writing prompt suits your practice, go for it. Watch where you end up spinning—it could be magical.
