Yearn

Yearn is a great prompt! Plain and simple, and evocative.

What have you yearned for in your life? A lost boyfriend in your teen years? A baby in your 30s when you really wanted to conceive? A holiday from long ago when you are home alone for that holiday, and your family is all gone?

Eager, restless, or painful longing can be the most difficult part of yearning. But yearning can be positive. When yearning approaches more of a nostalgia, the benefits of positive remembrance of yesterday become apparent. This reminds me of the Jewish condolence, “May their memory be a blessing.”

One of the strange things research has found is that genuine sadness or being manipulated into feeling sadness shows individuals experiencing nostalgia after the event at the same rate. This is not true for the severely depressed. Severely depressed individuals seem unable to view themselves or past events as positive through nostalgia.

Desire can be for something you have never had. “I yearn to be able to visit Scotland as my mother wanted us to.” You can yearn for a chocolate shake made with organic ice cream and fair trade chocolate. You can yearn for the seemingly unending pleasure of long childhood summers. These are all very real types of yearning.

I strongly suggest thinking about things you long for as a memoir prompt as the intense reality of things, people, places and even foods that elicit nostalgia are writing topics that will make you feel real to your reader. There is a big difference between writing a vignette on the men I have loved, and the one I still yearn for.

Put passion in your writing.