Read an Excerpt
Simply put, this book is designed to get you writing,
to help you find your voice or, as the case may be,
your many voices, so that the stories within you might rise and make a chorus of your multitudes.
The title of this book—Write It!—is from Elizabeth
Bishop’s “One Art”—a poem the poet famously sculpted through a series of obsessive revisions from a set of messy notes into a stunning villanelle. In it, she begins with a list of the things she’s lost, starting small: keys, an hour here or there, her mother’s watch. But even when she allows herself to list lost items as big as a house, a river, or a continent, she knows she still hasn’t acknowledged the true loss that forced her to the page. No, it’s only in the final line of the final stanza that the poet admits
she can tolerate the loss of all but her beloved and urges herself to be honest, to be vulnerable, finally,
to “Write it!”, forcing herself to own the truth she didn’t yet have the courage to say. To read Bishop’s poem is to witness a person’s movement toward selfrevelation through writing, and we hope these prompts will engage you on a similar journey.
So, what do you need to get started? Well, only a pen, really. Or maybe a pencil, if you’re the erasing type. Oh, and it will help if you carve out a space for yourself in terms of both time and place. Fifteen minutes here, a half hour there—whatever your life allows—along with a quiet little corner in which to write.
