Prompts can serve as effective catalysts for writing by jump-starting students’ creativity and free-associative thinking. One quick way to begin a lesson is to throw out an opening line, and to let your students complete it by writing a poem or prose piece. You can make up the opening line or choose one from a poem, short story, or play. Some teachers like to select a line that speaks to some query or interest the students are discussing (race, family, neighborhood, and so on).

Here are some prompts or first lines WritersCorps teachers have used:

Don’t tell me. . .
Don’t ask me. . .
When I look in the mirror, I see. . .
The voices in my head are telling me. . .
I wish I had. . .
I wish I could. . .
When I woke up this morning. . .
You should never have forgotten this. . .
I was not supposed to remember. . .
I never thought. . .
I am the kind of man or woman who. . .
I’m scared. . .
I see. . .
In my past life I was. . .

The following is a student poem in which the prompt became the poem’s title.

In My Past Life

I
was an elephant
running across the
plains of the desert
my feet pounded out
the hot beat
under the dry sun
In my past life
I was water
I came up from the ground in trickles
and rushed over
its parched surface
the zebras drank me
and gazelles
passed through me
In my past life
I was the sand
at the feet of the pyramids
I stuck to the toes
of the men who dragged
heavy rock over my back
In my past life
I was a beetle
and women picked me up
and put me into their pockets for
good luck
In my past life
I was a sound
I was the whisper of the mother
who put her child to sleep hungry
In my past life
I was the child
that watched my mother cry
because this was not the life she chose
But in her next life she will be the gazelle
and I will be the grass
and I will feed her and she will run free
away from the cold cement walls
who know her too well.

– Gabby Cole, age 17
Poem is from a 1999 WritersCorps chapbook at ArtSpan/Inner City Public Art Projects for Youth

Lesson is from the WritersCorps book “Jump Write In!”

Here’s one way to make thinking about point of view more accessible to younger children. You could do a similar exercise with objects and people as well as animals.

1. Sit in a circle.

2. Ask students to pick an animal they would like to pretend to be.

3. Ask students to step one by one into the center of the circle and show how the animal moves, how it eats, and what kinds of sounds it makes.

4. After the student is finished performing, the other students guess what animal she was pretending to be.

5. Then the demonstrating student tells the group how old the animal was and where it lives — in the wild or inside a house.

6. Next, give students profile sheets with the following questions:

What is your animal’s name?
How old is your animal?
Who is in your animal’s family?
What does your animal wish for?
What is your animal scared of?
Where does your animal live?

7. Ask students to fill out these sheets, thereby developing more information about their animal characters.

8. If they wish, students can draw a picture of the animal and its home on the back of the profile sheets.

9. Ask students to write a story or poem using these profiles. Prompt them by suggesting that they could write a story about a time their animal wanted something and tried to get it, either succeeding or failing in the process.

From the WritersCorps book “Jump Write In!”