Poetry & wordplay21 categories
Generate constraints to break a stuck draft
Staring at the same draft for a week with nothing new arriving.
I am stuck. Do not write the poem for me. Give me constraints that force a different draft. Produce ten exercises, each a single instruction I can act on in fifteen minutes. Mix these kinds: - Formal limits: line count, syllable caps, a banned letter, one sentence only - Lexical limits: only words I have already used, no adjectives, no abstract nouns, a vocabulary drawn from one trade - Perspective shifts: address the absent person directly, write it from the object's side, write it as a set of instructions, write it as testimony - Structural: start at the last line, remove every verb then restore different ones, interleave with an unrelated text Tailor each constraint to what my draft is actually doing wrong, and say in one clause what each is meant to shake loose. Draft: What feels stuck about it:
Making it yours
- Paste your own material where the prompt asks for it. Everything above that line is instruction, not content.
- Delete any rule that does not apply to you. A shorter prompt that fits beats a thorough one that does not.
- If the answer comes back vague, add a line saying what you do not want. Constraints work better than encouragement.
Getting a draft going. Forms, constraints, and raw material for when there is no poem on the page yet.
Related prompts
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