Writing Prompts: Best Advice You Never Got

Free Write Prompt

Tell me about the best advice you never got – meaning, the advice you wish someone had given you.  (OR) tell about the best advice you wish you had given to someone else.  Write for 10 minutes. Ready? Go!

Poem Prompt

Turn the [missing] advice into a kind, instructive poem to yourself, filled with redemption and hope and the love, or at least the advice you could have used.  (OR) You can be the speaker of the poem directed to someone else.  (OR) Someone you wish had told you so, could be the speaker. Write for 10-15 minutes.

Example Poems

Image by Yannick Lepère

First Lesson by Philip Booth​

A Father to His Son by Carl Sandburg
A father sees his son nearing manhood.
What shall he tell that son?
'Life is hard; be steel; be a rock.'
And this might stand him for the storms
and serve him for humdrum monotony
and guide him among sudden betrayals
and tighten him for slack moments.
'Life is a soft loam; be gentle; go easy.'
And this too might serve him.
Brutes have been gentled where lashes failed.
The growth of a frail flower in a path up
has sometimes shattered and split a rock.
A tough will counts. So does desire.
So does a rich soft wanting.
Without rich wanting nothing arrives.
Tell him too much money has killed men
and left them dead years before burial:
the quest of lucre beyond a few easy needs
has twisted good enough men
sometimes into dry thwarted worms.
Tell him time as a stuff can be wasted.
Tell him to be a fool every so often
and to have no shame over having been a fool
yet learning something out of every folly
hoping to repeat none of the cheap follies
thus arriving at intimate understanding
of a world numbering many fools.
Tell him to be alone often and get at himself
and above all tell himself no lies about himself
whatever the white lies and protective fronts
he may use against other people.
Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong
and the final decisions are made in silent rooms.
Tell him to be different from other people
if it comes natural and easy being different.
Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.
Let him seek deep for where he is born natural.
Then he may understand Shakespeare
and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,
Michael Faraday and free imaginations
Bringing changes into a world resenting change.
He will be lonely enough
to have time for the work
he knows as his own.

Reflections

• Find the right kind of [extended]metaphor for your multiple meanings.  For example "lesson" applies to the first swimming lesson, wherein one learns the float, learns to trust that extended arms and an arched back will hold you afloat in the water. It is the same calm one needs when "fear cramps your heart" and is therefore an important "first lesson" in life, as well.  The swimming metaphors of diving, thrashing in the water, swimming to your island, the dead man's float versus the survivor's float, aptly apply to the activity of swimming but also metaphorical advice for the conditions of one's life and how to "swim" and "survive" in the swimming/life journey.  
• The fine details of the narrator reassuring the daughter, cupping the child's head in his/her own hands, encouraging the encompassing view of the sky and seagulls and looking up, not seizing and panicking and sinking.  The speaker in turn comforts, instructs the reader with "trust me" and the survivor's float and that the ocean, indeed the universe, will hold you in this faithful approach -- the wide open arms float -- to life's challenges.

​​

Something Extra

"Instructions for a Bad Day" by spoken word poet Shane Koyzcan