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Currently viewing the tag: "internal monologue"
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Standing at the edge of the mountain, I imagined what it would feel like to let go. There were thousands of feet between me and the valley of the winding Urubamba River. It was lush and green and oddly inviting. I stared down, feeling an exhilarating combination of anticipation and trepidation tugging at me. -Hilary Davidson, The Next One to Fall
Fiction Writing Prompt: Write about a character who is on a precipice, literal or figurative. Focus on the internal monologue.
Journaling Prompt: How do you feel when you are about to take a leap of faith?
Art Prompt: To Let Go
Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Inspire your audience to take a leap of faith.
Photo Credit: JSmith Photo on Flickr
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Cause-and-effect thinking is critical to human survival, Legare said. So it’s natural for people to find logic in supernatural rituals that emphasize repetition and procedural steps. If doing something once has some effect, then repeating it must have a greater effect. For example, if a mechanic says he inspected something five times, the frequency of his actions leads the customer to overestimate the effectiveness of his work. -Science Daily
Fiction Writing Prompt: Create a ritual for your character to use and then write a scene about it. Focus on the internal monologue.
Journaling Prompt: What rituals do you use?
Art Prompt: Supernatural Ritual
Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Write about the psychology of ritual. Include stories about the rituals used by famous people.
Photo Credit: rodolfoaraiza.com on Flickr
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“Much of American culture in the 20th century has been engagement in death avoidance,” said Albert Hamscher, the university’s Kenneth S. Davis professor of history. “Bucket lists signify a willingness at least to discuss death again. But note how it is purely secular in its contours. It focuses on the here and now rather than the hereafter, which has been how people typically frame death.”
Death avoidance is a relatively new phenomenon in Western society, according to Hamscher. Philippe Aries, a 20th-century French historian, referred to the attitude as “the forbidden death” in his book, “Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to Present.” Instead of being exposed to it, which commonly happened in Europe until recent generations, people have been shielded from death. This avoidance became more popular with medical advances and increased secularization.
“Religion has always given death a frame of reference,” Hamscher said. “Absent that, death becomes a frightening topic. Death can appear frightening in that context because it has no larger explanation. It’s an existential black hole.” -Science Daily
Fiction Writing Prompt: Write the internal monologue for a character who is engaging in death avoidance.
Journaling Prompt: How do you feel about death, not just yours but the death of people you love?
Art Prompt: Death
Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Write about death avoidance in our culture.
Photo Credit: h.koppdelaney on Flickr
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Turning a corner, I ran into an old acquaintance—one of those long-winded fellows whose conversational powers ignore time and embrace eternity. -Paramhansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi
Fiction Writing Prompt: Write a scene where one person is bored by another. Include their internal monologue.
Journaling Prompt: How do you deal with boring people?
Art Prompt: Boring Conversation
Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Write about the art of conversation and how to tell if you’re boring someone.
Photo Credit: icethim on Flickr
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Thinking about leaving is something I sometimes do. Staying is what I do every day without thinking. -Louis Maistros, Anti-requiem: New Orleans Stories
Fiction Writing Prompt: Write a scene or character sketch about a character who is thinking of leaving. Include some inner dialogue.
Non-Fiction / Speechwriting /Journaling Prompt: Write about a time that you were trying to decide between staying and leaving, whether it be about a relationship, a job, or a location.
Art Prompt: Thinking about Leaving
Photo Credit: SodanieChea on Flickr
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I looked at the ice cream scoop in my hand…my chocolate-bespattered apron…and my future in the world of minimum wage work…or I could go up to New York and audition for this crazy band who was my favorite. What’s the worst that’s gonna happen to me? I miss a day of work…ooh, there goes 21 bucks. -Henry Rollins
Writing Prompt: Write a story, scene, or poem about a character who takes a risk to go after his or her dream.
Journaling Prompt: What would you be willing to risk in order to achieve your dream?
Art Prompt: Leap!
Photo Credit: jasonlam on Flickr
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…researchers have found that when people are put under stress — by being told to hold their hand in ice water for a few minutes, for example, or give a speech — they start paying more attention to positive information and discounting negative information. “Stress seems to help people learn from positive feedback and impairs their learning from negative feedback,” Mather says.
This means when people under stress are making a difficult decision, they may pay more attention to the upsides of the alternatives they’re considering and less to the downsides. So someone who’s deciding whether to take a new job and is feeling stressed by the decision might weigh the increase in salary more heavily than the worse commute.
The increased focus on the positive also helps explain why stress plays a role in addictions, and people under stress have a harder time controlling their urges. “The compulsion to get that reward comes stronger and they’re less able to resist it,” Mather says. So a person who’s under stress might think only about the good feelings they’ll get from a drug, while the downsides shrink into the distance.
Stress also increases the differences in how men and women think about risk. When men are under stress, they become even more willing to take risks; when women are stressed, they get more conservative about risk. Mather links this to other research that finds, at difficult times, men are inclined toward fight-or-flight responses, while women try to bond more and improve their relationships. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a scene about a person making a decision in a stressful situation. Include the internal monologue.
Journaling Prompt: How do you make decisions when you are under stress?
Art Prompt: Stressful Decisions
Nonfiction / Speech Writing Prompt: Inform your audience about the role of stress in decision making.
Photo Credit: Andrew.Beebe on Flickr
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The more afraid a person is of a spider, the bigger that individual perceives the spider to be, new research suggests.
In the context of a fear of spiders, this warped perception doesn’t necessarily interfere with daily living. But for individuals who are afraid of needles, for example, the conviction that needles are larger than they really are could lead people who fear injections to avoid getting the health care they need. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a scene with a character that has a phobia. Focus on the internal monologue.
Journaling Prompt: Write about any irrational phobia you have or someone you know has. How does it restrict your life?
Art Prompt: Spiders
Photo Credit: theseanster93 on Flickr
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The memories stored in our brain are either processed or unprocessed. If they are processed, it means that the brain has done its job and integrated a learning experience into our memory networks. Something happened that was disturbing, but I learned what I needed from it. I fight with a family member and I have a negative emotional and body reaction, but time passes and I think about it, talk about it, dream about it, and soon it doesn’t bother me any more. The appropriate connections are made in my brain and I might realize: “He’s been going through a hard time. We’ve had rough spots before and worked them out.” I decide what action to take and I feel better. In my memory network, what is useful is stored and what’s useless — like the feelings of anxiety or anger — is gone.
That is what the brain is geared to do: make the appropriate connections, “digest” the experience and store it in memory. But sometimes an experience can be so disturbing that the information processing system of the brain becomes imbalanced. When that happens, the experience is stored in an “unprocessed” form and still contains the emotions, physical sensations and beliefs that occurred at the time of the original event. So when I see the person again, instead of feeling OK, I have the same feeling of anger, hurt and anxiety. -Francine Shapiro, PhD
Writing Prompt: Write a character sketch for someone who has unprocessed traumatic memories.
Journaling Prompt: Write about a memory that continues to bother you.
Art Prompt: Memory
Photo Credit: Urban Woodswalker on Flickr
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Men put on their best behaviour when attractive ladies are close by. When the scenario is reversed however, the behaviour of women remains the same…
The research, which also found that the number of kind and selfless acts by men corresponded to the attractiveness of ladies, was undertaken by Dr Wendy Iredale of Sheffield Hallam University and Mark Van Vugt of the VU University in Amsterdam and the University of Oxford. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write the internal monologue of a male character who must make a decision while others are watching him.
Journaling Prompt: Write about how you make decisions when someone else is observing.
Art Prompt: Men and Women
Photo Credit: Dave Bezaire & Susi Havens-Bezaire on Flickr
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