Stuck in your writing and want to generate your own personal writing prompts? Writing memoir on the topics of home and family and need a boost? Try this simple technique.

1) Choose a category to direct your memories toward. Do you remember that game you played in the car on the way to wherever and nowhere? “Categories…such as…” as you tapped your knee and clapped your hands. Generalizing outward from the topic of home, for example, the categories might include: outside your house, what your body felt, food, privacy, sex education and curiosity, gardening and harvesting.

2) Open your journal and write "I remember" at the beginning of each line. When you finish, you'll have a list of writing prompts to use whenever you're ready.

3) You can also use this technique with your writing group. Start with pieces of paper of journals for each woman present. Each woman writes a line of memory and passes the journal or piece of paper to the next woman so that at the end, you will have a line from each person, with different lines in each journal.

In addition to generating a list of writing prompts on the subject of home and family, this “I remember technique” elicits lyrical images which have a quality of a list poem. The exercise can be done with “I remember” at the top of the sheet or “I remember” at the beginning of each line.

For each line, ask the question, “and what is it that I remember about this?” (about the first bedroom I had to myself, for instance) and you’re off!

Here's an example:

I REMEMBER

I remember the green fuzzy bricks in the patio,

my toes squishing in the mud.

Watermelon.

My first bedroom to myself.

Finding out about the facts of life

and wondering if the minister and his wife next door

“did it.”

Gleaning peas from the leavings.

Picking blackberries in the field.

Each of these could become topics for further exploration, or simply stand as a simple memory poem.