Write What’s Still Here: Prompts for Writers Between Seasons

There are stretches where writing doesn’t arrive the way it used to.

Usually, something else has shifted first. Your life changes and the way you reach language changes with it.

It’s easy to treat that as a problem to solve and assume you simply need more discipline, structure, or a better system to find your words again but writing doesn’t always respond to correction. Sometimes nothing is wrong with your relationship to it. You just need a way back without forcing the process or expecting to be who you were before you went through something that rewired things.

I’ve been trying to find my way through that too after life broke my writing rhythm open and altered it forever.

That’s what I was writing toward in Write What’s Still Here: Prompts for Writers Between Seasons.

It started as something I wrote in Google Docs during a season where writing felt far away (and still does) then I turned it into a PDF and put it into the world from there. I still don’t entirely know what to call it. A book? A book of prompts? Just prompts? A PDF? It changes depending on the moment I’m trying to describe it in. Maybe it doesn’t need a fixed name to be what it is.

Hearing that it meets someone in a similar place and actually makes a difference means a lot more than I can properly explain:

Through this project I’ve been reminded that writing doesn’t need permission to matter and it doesn’t need traditional publishing, polish, or a system around it for it to reach someone.

This is my small grassroots way of holding onto that truth and reminding anyone else who needs it that writing doesn’t have to be refined, packaged, made legible in a certain way, or edited into something “worthy” before it’s allowed to exist.

If you’re in a place where your writing just needs to exist as it is, WWSH holds it there with you.

Still writing,

Melissa