Creative Nonfiction Prompt
Using Speculation to Find Moments of Grace
By Lara Lillibridge
Like many of us, my history is filled with pain. While writing instructors cautioned not to write about my family until I had distance and closure, these were the very experiences I needed to write about in order to create that distance and find resolution. For me, the act of editing—going over and over the material for months—helps me find space between who I am and what happened to me. Plus, I don’t like to be told what I can’t do.
Unfortunately, the feedback a lot of my early writing received was that I sounded bitter. Of course I was bitter. You’d be bitter too. To make my writing publishable, I had to find a way to give mercy to the people who wounded me. As it turned out, giving mercy on the page also helped me to have mercy for them in my life.
My favorite prompt for accessing this mercy involves the creative side of nonfiction, which Lisa Knopp writes about eloquently in Brevity magazine. However, instead of using speculation to fill in unknown details, I use it to give a hypothetical explanation.
For example, in The Truth About Unringing Phones, in an essay about how my father rarely called me, I write,
Maybe my dad meant to call. Maybe he stood in his office, stethoscope tucked between the buttons of his pinstriped dress shirt and picked up the receiver, one hand extended to press the buttons and he happened to glance at the clock, and doing the math of the four-hour time difference, noticed that it was too late.
Perhaps he thought, “I’ll call as soon as I’m done with dictation,” but then his pager buzzed, and he had to rush down to the ER, everything forgotten except the current emergency.
As a grad student at West Virginia Wesleyan College, I had the opportunity to hear the phenomenal poet Patricia Smith speak. She said she always looks for the voice in the room who isn’t speaking, whose story isn’t being told. In my case, the unheard voice was my negligent or abusive parent. Now, for some people from our past, there is no redemption, nor should there be. This prompt is specifically useful for the complicated relationships we have, where our pain is not so simple.
I also want to clarify that grace is not the same as forgiveness. Forgiveness is a spiritual matter and not appropriate for every situation. When I use the word grace, I mean it as in Merriam Webster’s definition 2d., “disposition to or an act or instance of kindness, courtesy, or clemency.” We are giving our characters an act of kindness, and whether it is deserved or not is in our readers’ hands to decide.
How do we find these opportunities for grace? Here is the prompt I give my students.
First, write what you remember about a situation. Fully tell your story. Write as if this is the only version of the story that matters, because in my opinion, that’s true.
Next, think of what you didn’t or couldn’t know, and write into the absence:
I don’t know why . . .
Maybe . . .
If only I knew . . .
I recommend choosing one of the starter words/phrases and writing a series of sentences that all start with that word until you have exhausted it, then move on to the next word or phrase. Afterward, take your lists and choose a few to develop into a longer piece. This speculation might be in conversation with your writing about the inciting event, or it may stand alone. It might not even make it into the finished work at all, but the exercise hopefully will give you a moment of mercy, which will come through in subsequent writing.
Lara Lillibridge (she/they) is the author of The Truth About Unringing Phones (2024), Mama, Mama, Only Mama (2019), and Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home (2018), and coeditor of the anthology Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility. Lillibridge is a creative nonfiction editor for HeartWood Literary Magazine and holds an MFA from West Virginia Wesleyan College.