WRITING PROMPTS TO BENEFIT CHILDREN IN GAZA
UNICEF reports that in Gaza, “hundreds of thousands of children and families are caught in a catastrophic situation” and that, as of November 7th 2023, over 4200 children have been killed and more than 7000 have been injured “due to unrelenting attacks”, while over 1300 others are missing. Outlining the charity’s Appeal for Children in Gaza, UNICEF spokesman James Elder explains: “Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It’s a living hell for everyone else.” Elder has also called for “children held hostage in Gaza [to] be immediately reunited with their families and loved ones”. Recent updates state that “hundreds of thousands of children … remain trapped in a war zone with little or no access to food, water, electricity, medicine or medical care”.
For the duration of NaNoWriMo, we will be posting a writing prompt every day and in doing so, we are hoping to encourage our community to donate to charities providing medical aid to children in desperate need in this unprecedented crisis.
These prompts have been created by writers from Wales or with a connection to Wales and its magazines and presses. The prompts are on all kinds of subjects, but many are related to anti-violence and the work of empathy, and they are offered with the simple hope that they might encourage people to donate in support of medical aid in Gaza. We include a list of suggested charities to donate to below, highlighting the Appeal to Children in Gaza.
UNICEF “continues to call for an immediate ceasefire as 1.1 million people — nearly half of them children — in northern Gaza have been warned to move out of the way of a widescale military assault, but with nowhere safe for them to go”. Elder concludes: “The humanitarian situation has reached lethal lows, and yet all reports point to further attacks. Compassion – and international law – must prevail.”
DAY 11: Siân Melangell Dafydd
Translating the dawn chorus or the supermarket carpark
Start wherever and whenever it’s possible for you to head outdoors. Go alone or go with someone you feel you can make silly noises with.
Take a recording device rather than your notebook (or both).
So, first plant your feet well whether you’re standing or sitting. Become quiet yourself so that you can listen.
Let your attention bounce from one sound to another, whatever you are offered there, right now. If it’s very noisy, pick out individual sounds; if it’s relatively quiet, see how comfortable you can feel, physically and mentally (are you fidgeting?) as you wait for the next sound.
A birder once told me that there will always be three parts to a bird’s song: tone, pitch, rhythm. As you study each sound, see if you can identify those three parts and start practicing the sound yourself. This is where you need to be ok with a little bit of silliness. Mimic each chosen sound.
Once you have a sound, practice being it, and if you’re in company, let your sound be audible to the other(s) until you have a human choir, singing the world back to itself.
You have a nonsensical sound with identifiable tone, pitch, rhythm. What other word in a language you speak might sound like it – incorporating a similar tone, pitch and rhythm? Now change your spoken sound and allow it to be this word, while keeping the same tone, pitch and rhythm.
Keep translating the world around you in this way until you have a ramshackle of words that the world around you is really, really, speaking, rather than what message or words you think it ought to.
Your recording divide will capture the choir or solo sound so that you can write later.
The juxtaposition of word-meaning to setting, how fitting the sound of your word(s) are to how they really land in our ears (a tractor backfiring, a blackbird, whatever it may be) can be the starting point or the framework of your piece of writing.
Please consider donating to a charity providing medical aid in Gaza. We recommend UNICEF’s Appeal for Children in Gaza, but other charities include:
Palestine Children’s Relief Fund
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