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, ongoing as of November 14th 2023, over 4200 children have been killed and more than 7000 have been injured “due to unrelenting attacks”, while over 1300 others are missing. According to the World Health Organization, one child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes. 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 26: IAIN MORRISON
A Letter Prompt
Take a letter.
I mean a letter of the alphabet.
But then think about how it might grow in size, duplicating itself, adding other letters, to turn into a letter that you might send.
Begin to write this new sort of letter by opening a correspondence addressed to the alphabetical letter you first thought of.
If you thought of ‘O’, your letter begins ‘Dear O’.
Continue to write the letter. Maybe you know who ‘O’ is? Perhaps a persona for the addressee may start to shape itself, drawing on people you know or have known whose name begins with this initial letter? Allow other associations with the letter to enter your head. Could you be addressing a zero, or a masculine signifier, or an orgasm? Enjoy the feeling that something in your letter is withheld, is encoded, is discreet.
Sign off your missive with another letter of the alphabet, for example ‘B’.
Now, go through your letter. At any occurrence of the alphabetical letter you addressed this correspondence to see if it’s possible to change it to make a new word. For example, if you wrote the word ‘cloy’ you might change it to ‘clay’. If it’s not possible to change the word in this way just delete the letter and leave an enigmatic abbreviation or new word: ‘melody’ becoming ‘meldy’, ‘boring’ becoming ‘bring’. If you’re not happy with the results given by the changing or deleting the letter of the alphabet, delete the whole word.
The only remaining incidence of the initial alphabetical letter, the one that you’ve addressed your letter to, will be in that initial greeting.
Read through your newly edited letter and cut out any bits that you find uninteresting.
That’s one half of your correspondence done.
Now write a reply to this initial letter from its recipient (in the example from ‘O’ to ‘B’) following the same process as above.
When you finish this second letter, you will have a pair of constrained letter poems.
If you can, print or copy them out and find them envelopes. Tie or clip or band them together and leave the pair somewhere for someone – perhaps yourself at a later date – to find and puzzle over.
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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