Find below three Writing Prompts from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway for the weekend. The novel has many long sentences, which make for inspiration-based writing prompts rather than those where we'd copy a couple sentences into our story to get us going. I hope you enjoy these sentences as much as I do, and find them as inspiring as I do! Happy writing!
Write a love story where the relationship has never worked. It must be in the third person, with some retrospective evaluation, forgiveness, and letting go. Find a way to include this sentence from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in your story: “For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? —some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness…” Write a story from the perspective of a 52-year-old woman. Use these sentences from Mrs. Dalloway in your epigraph: “She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.” Include another character who always carries a knife, and a third one who also feels life is dangerous. Read the following sentences from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and then write a story or a character sketch about loneliness, not being able to say what one wishes to say, about having one’s own darkness descend on him/her/them. “Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hill-sides soften and fall in. But though they are gone, the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank of windows, they exist more ponderously, give out what the frank daylight fails to transmit—the trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there in the darkness; huddled together in the darkness; reft of the relief which dawn brings when, washing the walls white and grey, spotting each window-pane, lifting the mist from the fields, showing the red-brown cows peacefully grazing, all is once more decked out to the eye; exists again.” Follow The Ways of Black InkFor free writing resources, information and announcements about reading and writing classes, and that random poem.For questions and comments in English:https://waysofblackink.wordpress.com/waysofblackink@gmail.comWeChat: nazlusha