Planting seeds vs. planting crops: a new year’s narrative writing prompt

Guante

11 months ago

An artistic design with the text “of what future are these the wild, early days?” w/ silhouettes of birds, a sun, stars, and rain drops. Art by Natalie Hinahara. Words by Kyle Tran Myhre. — *design by Natalie Hinahara*

New year, new administration, new challenges (on top of the challenges that remain)… as always, I am interested in exploring the role(s) of artists in this historical moment.

It’s easy to fall back on platitudes like “we speak truth to power” or “we cultivate imagination” or “we plant seeds.” Those statements are all true! But what do they actually look like in practice? What are some specific tools and tactics for not just doing that work, but doing it effectively?

And when it comes to the idea of “planting seeds,” how might we go beyond scattering wildflower seeds as we skip on our own through the meadow, and instead work together to plant crops that might feed a community?

This post is the first in a series sharing some thoughts, questions, and ideas related to those questions. I thought I’d start with a writing challenge, since I am connected to so many poets and songwriters. While I regularly facilitate workshops and classes on creative writing, I generally don’t share a lot of formal writing prompts. For people looking for prompts, I often recommend Ollie Schminkey, or Ariana Brown, or Tish Jones, or this big online database. That being said, I’ve got one to share today.

A WRITING PROMPT: Read ReFrame’s 2025 Narrative Predictions resource

That’s basically the prompt, haha. This whole post is really just an excuse to point people in that direction. That link shares six big predictions for the year ahead, and those predictions are made up of over 50 “narratives at play,” stories (some positive, some harmful) that live underneath our beliefs and values. Toward the bottom of the page, ReFrame also shares six “narrative openings” that, along with everything else in the link, are the best writing prompts I can think of—they’re seeds that could grow into countless poems, songs, and beyond.

I get that this is a non-traditional prompt. It’s really just about lifting up the idea that culture workers can take an active, intentional role in shaping narratives; identifying which ones are especially present in the air right now can be a useful start. Below, I’ll share a few points to keep in mind for the writing itself, plus a few examples of what this work can look like. As always, I’m about tools, not rules; nothing here is a set-in-stone directive—just stuff to think about.

Getting started

We’re dealing with narratives. If that term is new to you, I often reference Narrative Initiative’s definition: Narratives are the themes and ideas that are carried in collections of stories. Narrative defines what we imagine is possible and why we want it, what we aspire to become and how, and whether we feel we have power with or over others–or none at all.

So if we’re talking about the stories that animate our beliefs and form the foundation of our values, it might be helpful to think in terms of literal stories. Potential starting points:

How did the fairy tales or folktales you heard growing up start?
What are some favorite pop culture opening scenes? How do your favorite movies, comic books, video games, etc. get you invested right away?
Imagine yourself in the future, telling a story about today to your great grandchildren. How do you share the wisdom you want to share while also capturing their attention?
What is a specific memory you have of one of these narratives being particularly present in your life? Describe that moment.

A bigger takeaway here is that it is tempting to just jump up on stage and start shouting our opinions. That’s not a bad thing; sometimes that is exactly the right thing to do. But narratives are generally not affected much by facts and statistics, or big opinions, or passionate manifestos. We shape narratives by telling stories. We can have big opinions, but the challenge is to craft creative and memorable containers for those opinions, to situate them in specific moments, animated by human drama and real emotions. So while there is a time and a place for the direct “here’s what I think!” approach, this writing prompt is an opportunity to flex our storytelling muscles.

Finding your entry point

On top of the mechanical question of how we get started, there’s also the deeper question of why we’re choosing to write about what we’re writing about. A question to ask: Am I directly impacted by this narrative?

If the answer is yes: What can I contribute to the larger conversation about this narrative? What parts of my story might I want to share? What parts are healthy to share? Who is this writing for? What kind of “work” do I want this writing to do?
- These are guiding questions, not questions with specific “good” or “bad” answers.
If the answer is no: Is this something I should even be writing about? Are there other voices I can lift up or signal boost instead? If I do choose to write about this narrative, what is a frame or approach that acknowledges my relationship to this issue and uses it to share something generative or useful?
- For example: I, as a cisgender guy, can write a poem that counters the narrative “there are only two genders,” but I have to write it as a cisgender guy, from that specific perspective, as opposed to trying to tell a nonbinary person’s story for them, or trying to write the thousand-foot view “nonbinary manifesto” when that is not my work to do, nor my story to tell. So maybe I tell a story about how dominant culture masculinity has shown up in my life, and how it impacted my relationships with other men, and how limiting and harmful “just be a man!” attitudes can be. That can speak to the danger of the “there are only two genders” narrative, but in a way that is authentic to my experience.

Another example of this dynamic might be seeing how Palestinian poets in Palestine and Palestinian poets in the diaspora (as well as Jewish poets, as well as everyone else) take different approaches to writing about the genocide in Gaza. I’ve put together a list of a few examples here.

This is a very small piece of a much larger and more complicated conversation. Hopefully these critical questions can be useful as a starting point.

Other ideas and possibilities for the writing

The six predictions and 50+ “narratives at play” in the link can all be powerful prompts on a content level; as for figuring out where to take these ideas on a form level, well, that’s the work. A few thoughts:

There’s an interesting (and I think healthy) tension between narrative as literal storytelling and narrative as something a little more figurative. Stories, to me, are something bigger than “a protagonist goes on a journey from point A to point B and learns XYZ along the way.” The “story” of a poem or a song can also be wrapped up in how it manifests in the world—who is sharing it, with which audience, for what reason.
- To use myself as an example: my poem “Ten Responses to the Phrase ‘Man Up’” is not a narrative poem in the sense that it’s telling a single specific story, but it is very much attempting to make a counter-narrative intervention. Forms like odes, open letters, elegies, list poems, and other common frames (at least in my universe of spoken word and slam poetry), even when they’re not necessarily telling stories, can still do narrative work!
Another healthy tension: Writing that engages with narratives is often about “pointing at the bad thing and affirming that it’s bad.” And yes, I think critique and this kind of truth-telling are vital functions of writing. That being said, there are opportunities for us to go beyond that, to create work that mobilizes, that calls-to-action, that inspires. Not every poem or song has to carry this “anthemic” energy, but I have found that it is worth asking “what is my audience going to walk away from this piece of art with?”
- “Anthemic” writing is something I’ve taught whole classes on, and am planning to share some public resources on that topic soon. Stay tuned!
On that note, this blog post is not an all-encompassing “how to write a political poem” guide. I do, however, often facilitate workshops and conversations on that topic—both for artists looking to more powerfully engage with movement work, and for organizers looking to tap into their creative power. Get in touch here.

A few favorite examples

This post could be 100,000 words long, with all of my thoughts on political writing; but at the end of the day, actual examples are probably more useful than anything I have to say.

When we think of classic “movement fiction” like Butler’s Parable of the Sower, or Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, their power is that they’re not just activist rhetoric in the shape of stories; they are actual stories first, with compelling, human characters, and some real vitality, style, and personality in the writing. There’s a narrative lesson here: being “right” is not enough; craft matters.
Related: Nemik’s manifesto in Andor is beautifully written, but I’d argue that the audience cares about it not because of its masterful rhetoric, but because we have gotten to know both Nemik and Cassian as human beings first, and are invested in how the words might impact them. The political rhetoric is framed and given real weight by the human story.
More TV examples: my favorite shows like Abbot Elementary, Reservation Dogs, Avatar the Last Airbender (the animated one, of course), and Shoresy/Letterkenney do sometimes make explicit political statements, but more often than not, their politics are infused into the stories they’re telling; again, it’s character-first. A story can be built around an issue, but it can also be built around a value that communicates something deeper than an individual policy position. Yeah, another narrative lesson: there is something potentially powerful about exploring the underlying, more “elemental,” values-based aspects of political positions.
The whole story of our All Dressed Up, No Funeral album is that it started as a challenge to address narratives related to the climate crisis. But it became an exercise in addressing narratives related to grief, despair and cynicism. That approach still allowed me to write about climate, but from an angle that was more mine, so to speak, something that felt more like my story to tell.
When I think of my favorite spoken word poems, and/or the ones I use most frequently in classrooms (I’ll share a few below), one thread that connects them all is the masterful use of concrete detail. This is also a narrative lesson, I think. Whether or not a poem is purely story-based, detail and specificity play a narrative function in making the ideas real, in grounding the big ideas or messages in a concrete reality. This might sound obvious, like some creative writing 101 stuff, but *so much* political writing forgets this. Anyway, a few favorite poems; some are more “traditionally” narrative and some aren’t, but they all have something specific to say about a particular narrative, and they all do it powerfully:

A million other examples to share and things to say, but this post is already too long. I’ll leave it there. Hope it can be useful.