Writing Prompt: STAGED
Visual inspiration + mental exercise to start your writing week
It’s all too perfect, that eloquent, beautifying spotlight, the rearguard poised to prop or defend, the surround-sound of understudies and acolytes, rivals and sycophants, aide-de-camps and apparatchiks, oh!
Metaphortography Prompts are free visual and verbal writing prompts for inspiration and reflection. This is the Monday section of Aimee Liu’s MFA Lore. Our Wednesday sections are Well Published, Live! videos and Writer In The World, a curated collection of essays on the writing life by acclaimed MFA faculty and alumni. MFA Core essays on the craft and business of creative writing drop each Saturday. Receive all these benefits, plus our bimonthly Zoom salons, for 30% off your annual subscription if you subscribe now:
STAGED
It’s all too perfect, that eloquent, beautifying spotlight, the rearguard poised to prop or defend, the surround-sound of understudies and acolytes, rivals and sycophants, aide-de-camps and apparatchiks, oh! and always out there burbling, swaying in the blue night the audience, oh the audience breathless to cheer or jeer you off and out into the wings, the wings where you will soon enough, inevitably enough, fly away at once ejected and freed.
STAGED
1: produced on a stage
2: arranged for public view or public effect
3: decorated in order to enhance appeal to an audience
4: faked
Here is your writing prompt:
As you contemplate the image above, remember and write out a moment when you/your character felt “staged” by circumstances that placed you on a pedestal, mound, podium, or set where all eyes fell on you, making you the glorified center of attention and expectation, whether or not you felt ready to meet the moment.
Consider:
What you’d done—or failed to do— to get to this moment
What was done to, for, or around you to place you on this stage—and why
How the stage or context was prepared, the ground laid for someone like you to claim this particular spotlight
Who was in the audience, with what expectations
How the attention made you feel
Who was waiting in the wings or offstage, and how they acted when you were done
How your feelings unfurled as the scene played out and ended
What happened when you were no longer onstage
What you learned about yourself
What you learned about those who’d placed you there
What your experience said or revealed about the world that selected you for that stage
Loreates’ Corner
This week I want to reintroduce you to a few of the wonderful stacks by authors who’ve appeared on Well Published, Live! with me. Most of these stacks have ignited since our conversations, so you might have missed them. I invite you now to take a look, read, subscribe, and share!
Juli Min writes Shanghai Baby:
Rachel Khong writes Short Story Short:
Christina Baker Kline write Christina on the Margins:
Edward Humes writes The Art of Being There:
Christine Sneed writes Bookish:
Lauren Ling Brown writes Lauren’s Substack:
Jenna Blum writes Jenna Blum:
PS: If you’re an MFA Lore subscriber with a great writing stack that I haven’t mentioned, please drop the link in a comment, so I can add you to our Corner.