My First Time: Julie Zuckerman

The First Time I Fell in Love with a Writing Prompt
The first time I fell in love with a prompt, I was in my second year of creative writing, with my second teacher.

My first teacher was big on prompts. She ran a small workshop in her home for small group of women each week, and she’d send us off with a prompt like “a mystery” or “a revelation” or “journal entries” and we could come back with a story, a poem, a piece of memoir, no longer than four double-spaced pages. I’d let the prompt swirl...