Today, we’re sharing a prompt called “First Lines,” from my friend Erin Khar, author of the memoir Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies that Nearly Killed Me.
Her prompt, which we ran on Day 9 of the project—along with a note from me about how we were almost a third of the way through!—is the perfect antidote to those times when the mind feels blank and inspiration is nowhere to be found.
Sending love,
Suleika
First Lines by Erin Khar
You’d think that as a memoirist, I’d always have plenty of stories to draw upon—after all, it’s my life. But as I was writing Strung Out, I dealt with my fair share of writer’s block. I’ve had to develop different ways of getting creatively unstuck. Sometimes it’s zooming in on a specific sense—noticing the air around you, the temperature, what your arm or shoulder or hair smells like.
Other times, to get myself going when I feel blocked, I start by pulling one sentence from a favorite book or essay and using that as a starting point. A few of my favorites lines:
From Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
“Let me tell you about the women who ran away.”
“Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t.”
“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that change when it comes cracks everything open.”
From John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire
“Keep passing the open windows.”
“Sorrow floats.”
“I thought he had rather delicate hands for a revolutionary.”
From Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water
“Little tragedies are hard to keep straight.”
“When morning came, even the sun looked wrong.”
“I am learning to live on land.”
“We raged by and through one another.”
Your prompt for today:
Choose a line from a book—you can grab the nearest one and flip it open to a random page, or pick an old favorite you’ve memorized by heart. Whatever grabs your attention; whatever intrigues. Use it as the opening sentence for today’s journal entry, and let the words flow from there.
One Last Thing…
Our prompts will always be free, and all are welcome. But if you have the means, we’re humbly asking you to consider becoming a paying subscriber. Over the last year, I’ve worked with the most incredible team of women to nurture this project, sourcing over 145 beautiful prompts from the most extraordinary people I could find, and coming up with new and exciting ways to build community. It’s been a labor of love but also a whole lot of labor.
Our hope is to continue to do this work—because isolation did not start with the pandemic, and it will not end with it. More and more, isolation is a feature of modern life. We want to continue providing opportunities for reflection, connection, and inspiration. We want to continue creating with you. Because as our friend Elizabeth Gilbert says, a creative life is an amplified life.
I do this work because I know it works, and it’s necessary. Here, we create ourselves. Here, we write our way through.