by Donna Wilshire

A quote from Robert Frost (about why a writer should carry some paper and a pen at all times for making notes of small, even insignificant things that happen as one goes about one's ordinary life):

"How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?"

When I heard that quote on NPRadio this morning, I immediately thought about the writers' group writing prompt last Friday ("soul mate") and Mickey Waring's poignant, beautiful remembrance of her five-year-old soul mate, an Indonesian boy opposite from her in many ways. It was a recounting of only a few of many things that have happened to her.

But then later, as she talked excitedly about that memory, something occurred to her: That young, soul-mate experience turns out to be one of the few times in her life in which she felt "out of the box" that usually confined and pressed down on her.

Pardon, the third person, Mickey. I probably didn't get the "what occurred to you" exactly right. But my approximation is an example of what Frost had in mind, I think. After you wrote down what happened, the events sank into another level or realization, even a deeper level of significance. And what do you do with that realization? That deep level of awareness and significance will quite likely give you the topic sentence of your final rewrite.

Women, Here's to taking our own notes so often that we develop our own prompts to write about: personal events that happen to us until eventually something occurs to us and we are prompted to write and write and write with such intensity that . . . after a few re-writes readers get mesmerized into our orbits.

Happy Easter.
Happy New Beginnings.
Happy prompts, happy scribblings, happy insights . . . happy, evocative topic sentences that draw your readers in! Comment.