I want to write. I check the news, learn about rising Covid-19 cases and falling markets. My inbox is teeming: solicitations, jokes, musical scores, and four chain letters, each asking me to send a poem or recipe to the first of two names, add my name, and forward the letter to 20 others. I’ll get to that after I finish USA Today’s “100 Things to Do While Stuck Inside Due to a Pandemic.” Learn a new language, organize your junk drawer, tackle a puzzle, binge-watch old movies. The plethora of suggestions exhaust me. I want to climb back into bed, but can’t even muster the energy for that. I sit at my desk in a Covid Coma, wanting to write.
I’m not the only person distracted these days. Students tell me they often draw a blank when they sit in front of their notebooks—if they have the focus to sit. Neighbors, friends and family members complain of similar maladies. So today, in an effort to cure a specific strain of writer’s block, I harken back to the Rule of Three, a writing principle that, contrary to Google’s Rule of Everything-and-Then-Some, suggests you stick to three words, three events, or three characters to optimize humor, satisfaction or effectiveness.
Stop, look, and listen to threes you have known: Three Little Pigs; Three Musketeers; Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness; jokes that begin, “Three men walk into a bar…”
Naturally, none of the websites follows the Rule of Three because that just isn’t how websites work. “The more the merrier,” saith the spider and other web weavers.
I’ve chosen and modified one prompt from each of three websites. I refer to writing prompts as “sparks.” Three sparks to light your fire. Pick one and write three words, three sentences, three stanzas, or three paragraphs. Or pursue The Artist’s Way and write three pages. Do that every morning. Move your pen and make writing guru Natalie Goldberg proud. Keep that pen moving. Build up your writing muscles.
Tomorrow, try another spark, and a third the following day. After three sparks, your writing practice may be on fire. Or you may decide to look into your liquid crystal screen and click for more sparks, writings, and resources that may help you shake your Covid Coma.
- The Attic Institute’s newsletter sends five sparks a week, a practice they started when Oregon’s stay-at-home order was issued. Here’s one:
Write a letter from your current self in your current situation to your future self – five, ten, or twenty years from now.
- Long before the coronavirus, NaPoWriMo (short for National Poetry Writing Month) challenged writers to craft a poem a day every April. The website offers, not only a prompt for each day, but also a resource. And if the 30 prompts for 2020 aren’t enough, you can scroll back to any April since 2013 and find something that may spark your interest:
Gather things on a socially-distanced walk: a flower, strange bark, a rock, whatever you find. Then, display your items like museum pieces and write about one of them, link them together, or channel their message to you.
- Portland’s Literary Arts program offers Writing Prompts for Stay-At-Home Writers with commentary and examples of how these ideas have sparked pieces for the writers who recommend them.
Write a piece that joins what is most difficult in the world with what is most beautiful…terror, honey, pestilence, child… (Kim Stafford)
Each of these three sites just might be an antidote for your Covid Coma. Check out one….or three and keep going. On your mark, get set, write!