Daily Creativity Prompt: Take What You Need

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.

“Leah has settled into a worldly life in New York City when she learns that her estranged stepmother, Jean, has died in their hometown. Jean had an accident while welding steel sculptures in her living room and bequeathed her oeuvre to Leah. Take What You Need alternates between Leah’s Trump flag-lined journey home to the same insular slice of the Rust Belt where Idra Novey herself was raised, and Jean’s path to belatedly producing outsider art. The result is an odd and beautiful novel about the ineffable impulse to make art, wedged into an exploration of what happens to towns and people left behind.”

— Kristen Martin, book critic