The Prompt
Write about an experience from your past that impacted you.
It can be from any period in your life. It must be something that happened. It can be a good memory or something difficult. The task is to bring your reader into your story with you.
Be experiential by using your senses. Describe your surroundings in detail; sights, smells, sounds, the touch or feel of something.
What were your physical and emotional responses? Help us related to how you’re feeling by taking us into it.
Reflect on something you learned from the experience, or something you didn’t see when you were in the midst of it that you do, now.
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Heidi Clausius
Heidi Clausius is a professional pianist, teacher and writer from Toledo, Ohio. She is currently working on her memoir, Year of the Nocturne. A story from her book was recently published in For the Love of Memoirs, “An Anthology of Emerging Authors.”
Heidi has been a member of Story a Day, Superstars since January 2021. She loves traveling with her family. You can find her at www.HeidiClausius.com
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Prefer paper crafts? Here’s the cut & paste version
Today, I knew what story I would write for the prompt. It is a story that surfaced during an oral storytelling workshop I participated in back in 2024. The first memory is of moving away from my childhood home as a young adult in the mid 1990s. I filled in quite a bit of memories after that memory to connect it to something that happened in 2021. My mom’s journey as she crossed over and my presence with her on that day. I cried quite a bit while writing it, and the ending has left me feeling quite emotional, the opposite of what I wanted to feel. However, the emotion is not all grief. It is also joy and gratitude. That I could be with her at such an important moment. The story ends with a song related to a robin, because I truly believe that she came to me as a robin the morning after I left her behind at the hospital. That song uplifts me and leaves me with inspiration. This is a story I will develop to tell aloud, and I will end with that song. It will require a lot of reading over to work through the emotions I experience with it, and then I will need to practice it a lot to process them more before I am able to tell it aloud without crying. Thank you for this prompt, Julie. I am getting a great deal out of the challenge this year. I left writing my story very late today and I almost went to bed without writing it. Once I decided that I would write tonight, it came very naturally if not easily.
That sounds like a great use of your time tonight.
And yes, I imagine you’ll have to practice and practice (and maybe be OK with crying in public once or twice — not that I think we should apologize for crying in public), but I have seen memoir writers talk about some very difficult topics in big rooms, and get through it, with that practice and distance.
Beautiful prompt, Heidi! I started working with a memory of being in ballet class as a kid and quickly merged with some recollections of a specific high school English teacher I had, who, rumour had it, was once a ballerina. I used both to craft a scene for a long neglected project, which made me pretty excited about getting back to it when time permits.
That’s a wondeful outcome.
(I, too, was in a ballet class for about three weeks as a little kid. It was not for me…)
Great prompt, Heidi! I saw things more richly as I sought for details when I looked back at my life searching for memoir-able moments. It was fun! The warmup/brainstorm is always a good time! What jumped out at me in the Brainstorm recording was Julie Duffy’s line: “Break the tyranny of the blank page.” Such a great phrase!!! Fortunately, of late, finding flow has been going well (knock wood it’ll continue) but I’m tucking it away, a reminder to get words on paper.
Today I wrote about a place, and one memorable person there. It was satisfying. I also delved fairly deeply into something painful but came away triumphant after stomping on it with the earned audacity of angry hindsight. A great, productive day all around!
There’s something to be said for catharsis. And more to be said for specific, rich details.
I used a short memoir I’ve been struggling with lately. It concerns me at age fourteen when I shared my bedroom for a while with my grandma. I hated sharing my room with her. She was judgmental of me even though I was never the kind of kid to cause problems. One day when she was planning on going with the family on a day trip to a new friend of my dad’s place, he told her she wouldn’t be going with us, which broke her heart. I was glad she wasn’t going. My shock at seeing how devastated she was when we returned home has stayed with me. It hurt her so much to feel she wasn’t considered part of the family. The prompt today showed me how to write this memory so it made sense. Especially the part about writing it from my perspective now. I had been trying to write it from first person from my age at fourteen. Another thing that helped was adding senses which I hadn’t even thought to include. And I was trying to write it as a story and not so much memoir. Truthfully, I was about to just delete the whole thing because I couldn’t get the fact of me not liking her to fit with feeling sorry for her. One memoir saved.
That tension between not liking her and feeling sorry for her is exactly where the best memoir lives. Glad the prompt unlocked it. Where does the memoir go longer-term?
I agree, Andrew. And that’s a good question!
Thanks Andrew, and Julie. After writing this memoir I was thinking about writing about the tragedy that caused my grandma to leave.
Oh, I’m so glad to hear this helped with that memoir. What a rich story that can be, with these new insights.
I wrote a short piece likening my intense memory of getting my teddy bear – where everything disappeared from my mind except the light and the creature – to my memory of the first time I saw the young woman with whom I later married.
The only strong sensory impression in both cases was the light, but that remains vivid.
You softie!
I dug back deep, thinking about my first boyfriend (In Grade 10), my first real date. We went to the opening weekend of Rocky (the very first one)
Then the memories came flooding in about several other boyfriends and how they led me to my husband. A really fun and interesting write.
This is great! I confess, without knowing what anyone looks like, I am picturing them each on garden stones along a path to your husband.
Now you’ve got me thinking about the (relatively short) chain of experiences that led me to know that ‘the new guy’ was suddenly ticking boxes I didn’t know I had 😉
Ok – so timing and chaos for the day. So my response is short, this, though, is the prompt:
#60 on the backlog ‘The sort of man we all dread becoming’ – Literary/observation
https://afstoryaday.blogspot.com/2026/05/im-only-55.html Note the full story, short follows:
I’ve had some ear troubles lately, once so bad I may as well have been deaf. A weird sensation, temporary yet softly painful. I’d like to think it gave me some empathy, some thought of those around me; my elders who live with deafness all the time, that or tinnitus. It makes conversations hard, shallow even. Frustrating those around you. My wife had no patience for it. This was sudden, though. How will I go when it sneaks up on me and becomes permanent? I’m only 55.
What will it be like at 75, eighty, even? Is it a dread, or a fear? I do not know. To be stuck in your head, and not hear. To miss the use of your wit. Watching those close politely try to engage in every way. When it’s even harder to be heard, they half-heartedly try before turning away. Their own thoughts cause pain as they see you slide away.
I look at those around me, my father, the old submariner mates marching, all with a world of experiences, locked away and fading from today.
I’m only 55.
realised to simple edits – added if, removed before. Go to the URL.
This is a risk of ‘One Draft’ days.
https://afstoryaday.blogspot.com/2026/05/im-only-55.html
The repetition of “I’m only 55” is quite effective.
I had a very strong sense of ‘I don’t wanna’ when I read the prompt for today. I wrote a bit about that in my warmup, that I struggle with memories. Like I ‘know’ stuff happened, but actually remembering details…nope. I actually had a similar conversation with my spouse last night(though that was about reading the manual for our new microwave/air fryer). Sure, I comprehended what I read ‘in the moment’, but did I remember what it was five minutes(okay, it was more like an hour) later? Nope! This is why I still have to check a recipe I’ve made 100 times before. Do I have some vague emotional memories, sure. But, it’s hard to put those into words.
So, thank you, Julie, for the permission to break the rules(even though my brain likes to play tug of war between ‘don’t tell me what to do’ and ‘gotta do what you’re told’)
So, I wrote a scene with someone trying to get my character to talk about his past, but he literally can’t. Because even the feelings about it feel shut away outside of him. And I now have 391 words of backstory for another one of my baseball players.
Excellent
I relate to this so much. Any prompt that asks you to did into your memories is a challenge for me and gives me that same “don’t wanna” feeling. My memories tend to be murky and vague and I think largely tied to association (like I since I’ve moved across the country, memories from before I moved are still there, but are more vibes than details. But things come back to me when I visit). Like you, I have the memories but the emotional and descriptive details are lacking.
The backstory for one of your baseball players sounds powerful, Fallon.
I haven’t even read what you wrote, but how you articulated the dilemma in the first paragraph is cool. If you carried this into 391 words, that’s real, and sounds like a good backstory for a baseball player.
Ha, Fallon & Shayna, I was always chided for ‘dwelling on things’ when I was younger. I wondered if it was something that maybe all writers do, but you are showing me that nope, we’re all different. (It does mean I have good recall of incidents from a fairly young age, but of course that also means I have good recall of the humiliations of being a child. LOL)
Well, see, I remember the emotional parts and dwell on those(like being bullied in school), but being able to bring those into details(like the actual things that were said and done)…not so much. So, I’m told well how do you know it happened if you can’t remember what was actually done? Because I was *there*.