09/21/2018
For this week’s creative prompts, the theme is technology. Take a few minutes, or more, to write into the computer-fueled future past—or art it out, whatever your medium may be.
Remember: this is just an exercise. Don’t overthink it, and don’t feel like you have to play by the rules. The only goal here is to practice and to generate new ideas.
- Invent a robot to accomplish a task you despise. Describe your invention using the five senses.
- Code can be beautiful. Pick an image and write a series of metaphors and similes about computer language focused on its visual qualities — e.g., like falling stars, ribbons of moss, june bugs spiraling a tunnel.
- Make a list of technologies (real or invented) you fear. Pick one to write further into.
- Use several words from this programming vocab list in a way that defies their linked definition.
- Create a formula for a poem or prose piece. For example: Each line will have three plurals and one noun. Each sentence will have one more word than sentence before it. Use your formula consistently or break it noticeably to see what happens.
- AI is all around us. Write a poem or piece of prose in which AI goes awry (actually or in imagination). Perhaps we’ve taught a machine to do something but it teaches itself more, or what it learns has unexpected consequences.
- Think of a wearable or implantable technology whose existence would’ve seemed improbable—if not impossible—to most people a decade ago. Describe it, as though for someone completely unfamiliar with it, and then write a scene or poem in which it plays a crucial role.
- Sit with your computer in a public spot and play around with this hacker impersonator. Write about any reactions you observe from the people around you.
- Free write about the earliest tech-related sci-fi show or movie you can recall. Maybe it’s Blade Runner, Inspector Gadget, Small Wonder, or Voltron? And may we never forget The Matrix.
- Imagine the world exactly as it is today, except that we’re missing one key piece of technology–like that we don’t have cars, or electricity, or refrigerators, or phones. What would be different, and what would be the same?
- Write an ekphrastic piece in response to one or more of these AI-generated visual art pieces.
Did you miss earlier prompts lists? Here they are.
Like what you’ve written? Put it away for a week, then revisit, and revise, revise, revise. When it’s ready to go, submit. If you have feedback, or ideas for prompts, please get in touch.