Daily Creativity Prompt: Symphony of Secrets

Every December, I take a deep dive into National Public Radio’s Books We Love list. Books are endlessly fascinating to me and NPR’s recommendations guide my holiday shopping as well as my To Be Read/ Listened To list for the upcoming year. I hope that these prompts inspire you creatively and encourage you to add at least one of these titles to your reading list for the upcoming year.

There is only one rule to this prompt challenge: the daily prompt should serve as the title of your piece OR all the words in the daily prompt should be integrated into your piece somehow.   

It is my honor and pleasure to publish your prompt responses on Brave & Reckless. I welcome poetry, prose, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, and high-res original art inspired by the prompt.

How to Submit

Email your submission to her.red.pen.wordsmithing@gmail.comWriting can be submitted in the body of the email or as a separate Word document or PDFIf you are submitting writing, please include a suggested image to accompany your work. Unsplash and Pixabay are two of my favorite sites for royalty-free images.Your email should include your name EXACTLY as you want it to appear on Brave & Reckless, a short biography (if you haven’t sent me one in the last few months), and any links you want shared.

I will start accepting responses to the NPR’s Books We Love Creativity Prompt Challenge immediately, but I will not start publishing them until the day that particular daily prompt is published. For instance, writing and art inspired by the book title A Study in Drowning will be published starting January 4, 2024.

“This haunting and heartaching second novel is a rarity – a suspenseful dual-timeline thriller about icons and hidden figures in music. Like the star of Brendan Slocumb’s debut, The Violin Conspiracy, Josephine Reed defies expectations. In the early 20th century, her options are severely limited; she’s a young Black woman and, though it wouldn’t have been called this then, neurodivergent. She’s also enormously talented, and her art is everything. She followed her passion to New York, writing music in secret, doing odd jobs, and sharing an apartment with a new friend, the ambitious but struggling composer Frederic Delaney. While Fred gets famous, Josephine fades away like so many new arrivals. Decades later, musicology professor Bern Hendricks receives an enticing call from an institution inviting him to restore Fred’s long-lost handwritten opera score for performance. What the young music professor and his high-tech partner Eboni discover could shake the foundation to the ground.”

— Carole V. Bell, culture critic and media and politics researcher