portion of the artwork for Zebulon Huset's poetry

Zebulon Huset’s Comments

While I’m pretty prolific by myself, I am a major proponent of writing prompts and exercises as a means of generating first drafts. You can think of it like rock climbing. The blank page can be incredibly daunting, even for myself. It’s like you’re looking at a sheer cliff face with no visible holds, and told to start climbing. You might spend hours trying to figure out where to even get that first grip. A prompt is like a beta climber showing you certain hand-holds you have to use. Then you’re no longer concerned with just getting to the top of that blank wall, you’re concerned with how to get from that item over there, to that idiom up here, then somehow make it all the way over to that geographical location (or whatever the required prompt may be). It’s not about conquering the world all at once, but in finding the piece’s “route,” and discovering for yourself how those various aspects triangulate some aspect of the human experience that might well have gone unexamined. To this end, I post new, original writing prompts or exercises every day at NotebookingDaily.com.


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FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry | Issue 55 | Spring/Summer 2020