Why I Write to Timed Prompts

By Barbara Krasner

During my MFA years, I prayed that each graduate and faculty lecture I attended wouldn’t require real-time writing. I needed time and space to think, after all. If speakers offered prompts, I doodled instead.

But after earning my MFA in 2006, I didn’t, couldn’t, write for a year. I felt completely burned out, especially from a workshop where my writing was torn apart by peers jockeying for position with the instructor. Everyone’s writing limped along as sacrificial la...