Writing Prompts from Rebecca Solnit’s Writing

Writing prompts from Rebecca Solnit’s nonfiction: I’ve read several books by Rebecca Solnit recently. I thought it’d be fun to list the sentences or paragraphs I’d underlined. Much of what she discusses is kindling for your own writing, including journaling. Her reflections on the current state of the country, as well as on ways to be in the face of so much negative news are both idea igniters. Here are some prompts. Since she makes for thoughtful reading, I hope you’ll go find the books and give them a thorough perusal.

Writing Prompts from Wanderlust

In dreary times joy itself is insurrectionary

When public spaces are eliminated.so ultimately is the public’ the individual has ceased to be a Citroen capable of experiencing and acting in common with fellow citizens. Citizenship is predicated on the sense of having something in common with strangers, just as democracy is built upon trust in strangers. And public space is the space we share with strangers, the unsegregated zone. 

They managed to start revolutions largely as marchers.

Writing Prompts from A Field Guide to Getting Lost

A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, ‘How will you go about finding the thing that the nature of which is totally unknown to you?’

The things we want are transformative, and we don;t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation.

Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea of the form of the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists, too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’–the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform teh unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out in the dark sea.

On a celebrated midwinter’s night in 1817 the poet John Keats walked home talking with some friends “and several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what qulaity went in to from a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature. . . . I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” 

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.

(From Virginia Woolf) “For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of–to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.

I couldn’t get literally lost but I lost track of time, becoming lost in that other way that isn’t about dislocation but about the immersion where everything else falls away.

A person in her twenties has been a child fro most of her life, but a stime goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came. For the elderly, often the nearby and recent become vague and only the faraway in time and space is vivid.

Only by losing that past would they lose the condition of exile, for the place they were exiled from no longer existed, and they were no longer the people who left it.

Caustic, literary, radical, she was the keeper of the family stories and photographs, though they served less as buttresses of a stable sense of the past than phantasms and fictions that metamorphose continually in accordance with the needs of the present. But all histories and photographs do that, public as well as private.

[Speaking of Cabez de Vaca] He was among the first . . . to come back and tell the tale, of Europeans lost in the Americas, and like many of them he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

Exceptional beauty and charm are among those gifts given by the sinister fairy at the christening. They give the bearer considerable sway over others, which can keep them so busy being a sort of siren on the rocks where others shipwreck that they forget that they themselves need to figure out where they are going.

I had been on my own since I turned seventeen, and that early independence made me old: I was never sure anyone would pick up the pieces if I fell apart, and I thought of consequences. The young live absolutely in the present, but a present of drama and recklessness, of acting on urges and running with the pack. They bring the fearlessness of children to acts with adult consequences, and when something goes wrong they experience the shame or the pain as an eternal present too.

It is that joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn’t fail, mortality enters in; is it 

If it is deeper than rock it is because failure is deeper than success,. Failure is what we learn from, mostly.

The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the story or the memory loses its power. Over time you become someone else. Only when the honey turns to dust are you free.

[The Holy Grail is] another story of disappearance, since those knights on the quest for the Grail who are pure enough to enter its presence do not return. It is only the sinners, the imperfect, the incompletely transformed, who come back bearing tales.

One of those in-depth local or state atlases that map ethnicity and education and principal crops and percentage foreign-born makes it clear that any place cam be mapped infinite ways, that maps are deeply selective.

Writing Prompts from The Mother of All Questions

 There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.

We are constantly given one-size-fits-all formulas, but those formulas fail, often and hard. Nevertheless, we are given them again. And again and again. They become prisons and punishments; the prison of the imagination traps many in the prison of a life that is correctly aligned with the recipes and yet is entirely miserable.

I know a woman who was lovingly married for seventy years. She has had a long, meaningful life that she has lived according to her principles, and she is loved and respected by her descendents. But I wouldn’t call her happy; her compassion for the vulnerable and concern for the future have given her a despondent worldview. What she has had instead of happiness requires better language to describe. There are entirely different criteria for a good life that might matter more to a person–loving and being loved or having satisfaction, honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope.

The very definition of what it means to be human is narrow, and altruism, idealism, and public life (except in the forms of fame, status, or material success) have little place on the shopping list. The idea that a life should seek meaning seldom emerges; not only are the standard activities assumed to be inherently meaningful, they are treated as the only meaningful options.

In that moment, we knew that we were all weird, all in this together, and that addressing our own suffering while learning not to inflict it on others is part of the work we’re all here to do.

If you have not been taught to collaborate, to negotiate, to respect and pay attention, if you do not regard the beloved as your equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, you are not well equipped for the work of love.

[Quoting Mary Beard] “It doesn’t matter much what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway.”

Being a woman is a perpetual state of wrongness, as far as I can determine. Or, rather, it is under patriarchy.

There is always something unsaid and yet to be said, always someone struggling to find the words and the will to tell her story. Every day each of us invents the world and the self who meets that world, opens up or closes down space for others within that. 

The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of our tasks. It’s how we make the world.

The judgments we render about each other are often made by avoiding the evidence. Categories become containment systems for some of us. Who we are and what we do is routinely packaged in dismissive ways.

Any individual woman is liable to be treated as a walking referendum on women—are we all emotional, scheming, math-averse?—while men are relatively free of being this measured. 

It isn’t possible to be racist without holding an unexamined faith in categories. 

Not seeing category can also be a form of insight. 

I’ve been proffering my opinions and finding that some of the people out there, particularly men, respond on the grounds that my opinion is wrong, while theirs is right because they are convinced that their opinion is a fact, while mine is a delusion.

I know many people who found a book that determined what they would do with their life or saved their life; if there is no one book that saved me, it’s because hundreds or thousands did.

Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams wrote recently that we live in a matriarchy because “access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman.” Meaning that you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you, which, if we say it without any gender pronouns, sounds completely reasonable. You don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you, and that’s not a form of oppression either. Your probably learned that in kindergarten.

You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us or breaks us.

There are a lot of movies about how to get into a relationship, a marriage, about falling in love, and some about falling out, but not many about keeping at it through the years. They quarrel, make up, endure, adapt, beget.

For more of Solnit’s views on the current state of feminism and #MeToo, LitHub has an essay here. For more quotes from authors I’ve enjoyed look here, here, and at the search bar for others. Happy writing!