Inside the Making of a Prompt

Exploring the promise of the photograph

Before a prompt is shared, there’s a kind of quiet searching. Searching for nuance and possibility. I’ve been working with my photographer to find the right image for the first Frame & Phrase prompt — something that suggests, that opens up as much as it declares. We’ve discussed shadow and line, stillness and motion. A prompt begins long before the words appear. It’s a slower process than I expected, and maybe more poetic than I expected.

We haven’t chosen the final image yet. Some images are too literal. Others too abstract. The ones that stay with me are the ones that don’t make sense right away — the ones that hum a little. That’s the promise of a good prompt, I think: it doesn’t hand you a poem. It holds a question.

The right image always arrives, eventually, like a line you weren’t trying to write. Even a prompt needs its own kind of patience.

Stay close. It’s at hand.

Write and thrive,

Robbin