PRISM Prompts is a treasure chest full of muses, wonderings, and inspiration for both seasoned writers who are itching for a new approach to their craft and new writers who are looking for a place to get started, somewhere outside of the blank page. Turn the key, lift the lid, and look inside. Take whatever shines the brightest or the strangest, bring it home with you, and write.
Oh, hi! I’m glad you’re here.
One of the things I love about hybrid literature is that it’s a form with a lot of room and flexibility to shape-shift and be whatever you want it to be. Because “hybrid” is such a large and elastic container, almost anti-container, it can feel a little intimidating to make that first mark on the page. One of the easiest ways to find an opening into hybrid land is by experimenting with form, cutting it apart, and dismantling and distorting its shape. Let’s get weird!
Prompt: Genre Grinder (adapted from a writing prompt by Nalo Hopkinson):
Part 1. Make a list of all the different written forms you can think of that we don’t normally associate with creative writing—it could be a recipe, shopping list, invitation, Q&A interview, cover letter, report card, police report, calendar, advertisement, role-playing game, tax return, birth certificate, eviction notice, voter’s ballot… anything and everything that comes to mind. Spend three to five minutes on this step.
Part 2. Now take a piece of writing that you already have (yours or someone else’s), and try reshaping it into one of the forms above. It might be a horror story written as a blog, or a love poem written on the back of a cereal box, or a comic strip of some obscure band’s setlist. Try out some combos. You will likely have to make some decisions about what feels essential to you, and what you can whittle away in order to work the old form into the new. Do this cutting away quickly. You can always add things back in later if you miss them.
More options:
*If you’re really uncomfortable cutting and pasting and reanimating your work, start writing a whole new piece for your new form.
**If you’d like to take it One Step Beyond, you can make a second list of all the literary genres you can think of, and pair these up with List #1.
***Two Steps Beyond: Let a pair of dice or number generator or another Chance Procedure choose which forms you use. Randomization filters out the constraints we tend to put on creativity, the inner voice that tells us, “This is good. This is not good.”
You may find as you work this way that some of your pairings are kind of ugly, or they just don’t work together the way you thought they would. That’s okay. Think of these as a starting point, a way of getting your head into a different space, undoing and redoing some of the ways you’ve been conditioned to think about literature. I encourage you to be curious, to open the doors that want to be opened, and to allow yourself to be a receiver/antenna for these new ideas and associations.
I’d love to see what you come up with, so feel free to send your experiments to me at prose@prismmagazine.ca
And if you feel really jazzed, you can submit to our upcoming HYBRIDS issue #62.3 HERE!
Happy weirding 🙂
Natasha
Natasha Gauthier is a white and Indigenous hybrid writer and visual artist who lives on the stolen land of the Qayqayt First Nation and Coast Salish peoples, commonly known as “New Westminster, BC.” Her writing has previously appeared in The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review, and CV2/Prairie Fire. She’s a cool mom, a lover of all things freaky and weird, and the current Prose Editor for PRISM international.