Prompts:

In writing, prompts serve as starting points to inspire, focus, and guide a writer’s drafts. The following prompts focus on two characters, incorporate dialogue, and explore both silence and sound.

Prompt: 1

Write a scene between two characters where one of them chooses not to speak. How do they communicate? What tension rises in the absence of words? Let the silence shape the rhythm of the piece.

Prompt: 2

Write a scene between two characters in which one of them cannot stop talking—interruptions, digressions, unfinished thoughts, rants, etc. How does the other character react? What is revealed (or concealed) in the excess of language? And why now?

All prompts are designed by Atina Hartunian.

Art by Verena Raban

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Atina Hartunian is a writer, independent scholar, and educator. A first-generation Armenian-American, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in 2023. She received a Teaching Fellowship from Anaphora Arts (2024), a Pacific University MFA Merit Scholarship (2021), and has been awarded residencies with the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and Rockvale Writers’ Colony and most recently from the Carolyn Moore Writing Residency.

Currently, she is developing constraint-based prompts for generative writing sessions and a five-part Horror Lecture Series, which she has presented at the ThunderDome Conference, The Writer’s Center, and CALYX Press.