Do You Feel like Writing?
Do You Feel Like Writing? is Frankie Rollins’ writing guide to help writers at any level improve their writing by embracing their fifth brain, a concept Frankie explains in the first chapter available to download below. Frankie’s writing prompts, primarily for fiction writers but applicable to all writers and also other artists, are also included. Please browse and select prompts to energize your writing.
The Fifth Brain
"The fifth brain is a metaphor for ease of accessing imagination, harnessing material, and trusting in a writer’s uniqueness. The fifth brain works in the unconscious, making connections. When I came up with this metaphor, years ago in a college creative writing class . . . I said that it seemed to me that a writer’s mind has several components, like a cow’s four-part ruminant stomach, each to do a separate part of the writing. Setting, point of view, relationships, associations. But the most important part of the brain, what I called the fifth brain, is the one that synthesizes the information provided by the rest."--Frankie Rollins, excerpted from Do You Feel Like Writing?
Writing Prompts
Tips for writing with prompts: In the first chapter of Do You Feel Like Writing?, Frankie offers this advice: “You can approach these exercises with great freedom and a sense of play. Remember that everything can have a story. Put a word down, or a few, nab a feeling or a description or a sensation or a belief. You can always use biographical prompts to explore characters rather than yourself. Trust that you have permission. There is no such thing as an imposter writing your sentences. Just you, the writing instrument, and your fifth brain.”
Responding to prompts can be used as a tool at any stage of the writing process to nudge you further into your project or writing task. In Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind, Goldberg uses the phrase “timed writing practice” and asks the writer to commit to a certain amount of time–five minutes, twenty minutes, an hour. Once the writer commits to the time, here are the guidelines:
1. Keep your hand moving.
2. Lose control.
3. Be specific.
4. Don’t think.
5. Don’t worry about punctuation, spelling, or grammar.
6. You are free to write the worst junk in America.
7. Go for the jugular.
Find the full list of writing prompts from Do You Feel Like Writing? as a PDF below.
Frankie Rollins
A talented educator for over twenty years, Frankie is also a publishing writer.
She has published a novella, The Grief Manuscript (Finishing Line Press, 2020), a collection of short fiction, The Sin Eater & Other Stories (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2013), and a novella, "Doctor Porchiat’s Dream" (Running Wild Press Novella Anthology 3, December 2019), as well as fiction in Feminist Wire, Fairy Tale Review, Sonora Review, Conjunctions, Bellevue Literary Review, and The New England Review, among others.
Website: http://frankierollins.com/