8 ways to turn admin into writing prompts
In college I had a bad date with my then-boyfriend. It was clear from the not-talking and him not sharing any of his steak that we were near the end. I used the receipt from that meal as structure for an anti-love love poem — the prose was itemized, the sub-total and the total had explicit meaning.
Though that exercise was a bit hokey and my relationship with the steak-hoarder failed, I developed a new love after that receipt experiment: paperwork as writing prompt. Two decades after that bad dinner, my belief in the creative potential of administrative detritus is still going strong. Here are some of my favorite ways to find inspiration in junk mail.
Bad Romance
A while back, I started researching how people get divorced in my state of Connecticut during the pandemic, and found out they have to go through a poorly-named procedure — “PEP!” — that forces aspirational divorcees to journal about their feelings. I pictured what that journaling would look and sound like during quarantine, and created a story that ended up as an Audible Original called “This is Not Your Fault.”
Other places you can dig for inspiration that could lead to rom com writing:
- Receipts: There’s the obvious example of my failed dinner out, but there are many other ways that a couple’s life is…
