Weekly Prompt Roundup: Hogwarts, Laundry, and Visual Art

Welcome to a week's worth of writing prompts! If you read our very first roundup, you know this is a new venture to try and increase community in a time of social distancing. Each day, we post a writing prompt on Twitter and Instagram that we're encouraging you all to interact with. You can reply with a single tweet/post, follow up with an entire thread, or post a picture of whatever work you're inspired to create. Each week in our roundup, we'll be featuring some of our favorite replies as well as expanding on the prompts.

The week got off to a magical start when we asked you to create your own Hogwarts house.

What characteristics would the perfect student embody? Who would be its famed founder? What would its students excel and fail at? This is the perfect opportunity to play around with symbolism as well. Create your house—then create its crest. Make a visual or written representation of just which symbols perfectly pair with each characteristic and drape those images through your piece. They'll add a rich layer of additional meaning.

Things got tricky on April Fools with the request for surprising final lines.

*ahem*

There once was a man from Nantucket

Who kept all his cash in a bucket.

But his daughter, named Nan,

Ran away with Miss Jann

And the man spent his money on a nice celebration of their love, and they all lived happily ever after.

Thursday was for airing dirty laundry (and then assigning each item a super power).

Disgusting, slimy sock? Definitely has the ability to release trapped souls. (What can I say, my mind's still on Hogwarts.)

That sports bra definitely got a bit musty during a battle with dragons—in which the wearer became a dragon themselves. (Moving on to my Narnia call outs.)

You can really lean in to the times by assigning your week-old sweatpants the ability to make the wearer invisible to the world.

Even with prompts, creativity gets stunted. Why not lean into it by writing "I don't know what to write and . . . " over and over until something clicks?

Predictive text can jump start this, too. Unless you're my phone, which just pulled together, "I don't know what to write and then I'm headed to work and now I have a few minutes of my life to get done with my stuff." Which is painfully accurate of my day to day (and my conversations, I guess). I bet yours will be more fun.

The weekend kicked off with a vacation-from-home when we asked you to explore the online collections at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Do you draw inspiration from contemporary art?

Is photography more your medium?

Have you ever examined textiles?

Sunday reflected on the best and worst parts of your week and day.

Personally, the need for social distancing has me exploring new, discreet trails I'd never come across before. I've found it's pretty easy to slip away into the woods even in the middle of Minneapolis. And even though I'm not someone whose writing is inspired by nature, being in solitude among other life has a calming effect on my ever hectic mind. The worst part is the concern about and wretched useless feeling regarding my friends and family across the country. It's hard to balance all of these emotions and experiences, but there's something wondrously human in the complexity.

Finally, the week of prompts wouldn't be complete without our furry friends. So we want to know: what's your ideal pet?

Bonus points if it's a creature you make up entirely.