6 Sensitive Writing Prompts for Navigating Big Emotions

The biggest and rawest emotions make for some of the best poetry. However, it’s not always easy to translate feelings of rage, devastation, and heartbreak into words. You might feel like you’re failing each time you try, or like a few stanzas can’t reflect the magnitude of what you’re feeling. Here are a few tips to get what’s going on inside out onto the page—and to tap into some of writing’s healing benefits at the same time. 

Conceptualize your emotions as a color.

From Maggie Nelson’s Bluets to Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, color has helped many poets distill a feeling into one strong image and to create an aura or mood that settles over a poem or even an entire collection. While at first color symbolism may seem basic, returning to some of the genre’s most classic images can help you find new ways to reinvent them. Prompts like writing a series of poems with colors in the titles, writing a poem from the perspective of a color, or using a color unexpectedly (like mentioning yellow when writing about grief or blue when writing about deep joy), are just a few ways. Picture yourself sinking into your feelings like you would sink into this color, finding a creative cocoon. 

Write about an object that symbolizes or holds your feelings.

The best poems use surprising specifics to illuminate universal emotions. And writing about intangible subjects like emotions can become easier when they’re grounded in what we can see, hear, taste, smell, and touch. What object serves as a talisman for your current feelings? Maybe it’s that crumpled receipt from the bagel shop at the bottom of your purse, maybe it’s a piece of broken jewelry, or maybe it’s a specific, dusty title on your bookshelf. The more detailed and unexpected, the better.

Start or end a poem with the words that you wish someone would say to you – or what you would say to someone else going through this situation.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could be just as compassionate with ourselves as we are with others? Typically, we know the kind, judgment-free, advice we would give a friend—but accessing this care and belief in ourself can be much more difficult. Are their words of advice, affirmation, or understanding you’ve been looking for? Write from or toward them by beginning a poem with those lines. For inspiration from a poem that does this well, read Kim Addonizio’s breathless and comforting “For the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall.”

Describe how your emotions feel or manifest physically in your body. 

Deep or difficult feelings can be cerebral and exhausting. Getting out of our heads and into our bodies can serve us in these situations. It can also help us explore the connection between the two. For example, teachers and lovers of yoga often say that the hips are a site of stored emotion, and recommend poses like pigeon and child’s pose for releasing them. If your current feelings lived somewhere in the body, where would that be? Are they a feeling in your stomach, in your shoulders, or at the base of your neck? Write from that embodied place, accessing the emotional through the physical. 

Process your journey in a before and after poem.

Emotional times can turn our worlds upside down and leave nothing the same as it was before. What has changed for you as a result of your current feelings? Do you feel like the same person? Has your physical environment shifted? Write a before and after poem to give voice to these changes. To drive home these dualities, play with forms like couplets— stanzas of two lines each—or the trickier, layered contrapuntal. 

Find the nuance by listing your feelings—even if they contradict each other or surprise you. 

High emotions can leave us low on energy. Enter the list poem—a form that’s less intimidating to begin. This form is just what it sounds like, and can pack a lot into one work. Listing your feelings can help you get to the root of them and explore their complications. Alongside your grief, are you feeling unexpected gratitude? Alongside excitement, are you feeling anxiety? Lean into these seeming dichotomies. 

Need more poetry to support you through emotional whirlwinds? Lean on our reading and writing prompts to help you navigate grief.