8/12/2023 0 Comments Summer writing prompts tumblrThere is no need for explanation or preamble-just dive right in. Just quiet your mind for a moment and then write the first true thing that comes to you. Hemingway says to write “the truest sentence that you know,” but this might be intimidating to the overthinkers among us. To borrow from Ernest Hemingway, write one true sentence. Then write the first thing that comes to mind. Start by writing down the number 1, like you’re beginning a list. There are certainly many ways to write an essay based on a numbered list of five things, but this is how I write them. In the cosmology of the ancient Greek philosopher Pherecydes of Syros, the God of Time distributed his seed-a “watery chaos”-into the five recesses of existence so that the cosmos could be born. There are Five Pillars in Islam, five books in the Torah, five wounds on the body of Christ, and five faces attributed to the god Shiva. The pentagram is an infinitely self-regenerating shape in which can be found the golden ratio, long believed by philosophers and artists to possess the secret to aesthetic harmony. The human body, with arms and legs outstretched like those of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, resembles a five-point star, a symbol of wholeness, nature, and divine blessing to Pythagorus and his followers. We have five senses, five basic tastes, and five fingers on each hand. In mathematics, five is both the first good prime, and the first safe one. But maybe there is something special about the number five, too. There seems to be something about the number five that helps give a satisfying structure-at least to the writer, if not to the reader. Creatures forged by the same environmental pressures. Or it may have developed separately, a kind of writerly convergent evolution, a carcinization of words, like the way different animals keep independently evolving into the shape of crabs over and over again in the dark depths of the seas. Or it might have been adapted from a fanfiction trope that goes back at least to the early 1980s, called Five Things, or Five Times. It may have come from LiveJournal blogs of the early 2000s, out of which emerged a popular type of entry called Five Things Make a Post. I don’t know who, if anyone, originated the form. These “things” usually included a mix of observations, thoughts, confessions, memories, recommendations, or questions, each ranging in length from many paragraphs to just one short sentence apiece. Back in the misty olden days of writing on the Internet (i.e., some time around 2013 or so), writers I followed online would often share posts on Tumblr or other blogs that were structured around a numbered list of five things.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |