Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Reading for Writing

I am reading Azar Nafisi’s memoirs. Azar Nafisi, if you haven’t heard of her, is a professor at John Hopkins University. As an intellectual, she has written in the most prestigious forefront news media and is the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

The title of her memoirs, Things I’ve Been Silent About attracted me to the book, only because it immediately provoked a writing prompt inside my mind.

What a great title! It made me think. What am I silent about? What are you silent about? What is anyone silent about? What can the characters we create be silent about?

Maybe we start with ourselves first, even if we keep our answers inside our computers under lock and key.

Prompt: I am silent about ……

Write ten times this sentence on every other line in a notebook or in a word file in your computer. Fill in the blanks. Be frank with yourself. Then, for each sentence, write a paragraph or as long as you wish .

Reading a few pages more in the book, I came up with another writing prompt, because she said she found out that what was told her as family truths and what people generally acted as if they believed were fictions to save face for themselves or for each other. So , I thought, 1. What were the family fictions you grew up with? 2. What were the truths behind them, that is if you ever found out?

So here is another prompt:

One family fiction I grew up with is …..

Write the ten sentences and then elaborate on them.

Ten sentences because I find writing ten sentences on a prompt and then picking them one by one or choosing from among them yields for more powerful in-depth writing.

Another sentence that attracted my attention, “When the facts did not suit her, my mother would go to great lengths to refashion them altogether.”

Gosh…I know so many people like that. Do I ever do that?

See what a good writer makes you do. She makes you think about yourself and the people around you and gives you ideas about how to look deeper into things.

And I just started reading the book.