These prompts are offered individually or taken together as a whole, whatever comes to you. Or you may find just two of three words take you off into your own writing world. With prompts, you can’t get anything wrong, as long as you write and keep writing as far as the energy takes you. The paradox, as always, is that the less you aim for excellence, the more easily the good stuff will be free to find you. Have a happy time:
The lad came to the door at night,
when lovers crown their vows,
and whistled soft and out of sight
in shadow of the boughs.
A Shropshire Lad, LIII, The True Lover, AE Housman, 1896
For I will consider my lover, who shall remain nameless.
For at the age of 49 he can make the noise of five different kinds of lorry changing gear on a hill.
My Lover, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, Wendy Cope, 1986
“A mighty pain to love it is,
And ‘t is a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.”
Abraham Cowley, The Poems of Abraham Cowley, 1618 – 1667
‘Father! Father! Where are you going? / O do not walk so fast.’
Little Boy Lost, Songs of Innocence & Experience, William Blake, 1794
But it was from one little window, with its blind drawn down, a mere blank transparency on the night, that the sense of home and the little curtained world within the walls – the larger stressful world of outside Nature shut out and forgotten – most pulsated.
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame, 1908
it’s not that i miss tamarind balls mashed up in my palm
squashed by my thumb licking it clot by sticky clot
on its way to my mouth
Rosie Johnston 