Projections of What We Fear In Ourselves

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

🔗Post contains Amazon associate links (shown with Aal in parentheses)
🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to each of the challenges to navigate easily to the prompt of your interest: OctPoWriMo for poetry; Writober Flash Fiction for flash fiction; Halloween Photography Challenge for photography
🐦‍⬛Example poems are copied here for educational purposes.
🖼️I made these banners from my photos and free for commercial use fonts. Feel free to use them in your posts.

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Mirrors

“. . . merely curving a mirror’s surface can plunge a man into an imagined world” ~Umberto Eco Foucault’s Pendulum_(Aal)

Mirrors distort images in different ways. This distortion creates a conflict between seeing and believing which causes discomfort. The reflection in a mirror is also reversed, so though you know you are moving your right hand, if you switched places with the you in the mirror, you would be moving your left hand. This becomes even more apparent if we write a word on a piece of paper and hold it up to a mirror.

Mirror-writing, writing letters and words in the reverse direction is common in children between three and seven. “Children grow out of mirror writing, but in some adults it makes an unexpected return. . . .The prototypical adult mirror-writer is a right-hander who loses right-arm motor function following left-hemisphere stroke, being forced to write with the left hand.” ~Robert D. McIntosh and Sergio Della Sala from “Mirror-writing”

But Leonardo da Vinci appeared to write in mirror-writing on purpose. You may be inspired by trying some mirror writing like Leonardo da Vinci with The Museum of Science’s mirror writing activity.

OctPoWriMo

Mirrors symbolize reversals, reflection, and distortions. What is your relationship with mirrors? Can you think of a time that a mirror frightened you? If you slipped through your looking glass, what would your mirrorworld look like?

Example Poem: “To the Mirror” by Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Tony Barnstone) from Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman_(Aal)

To the Mirror

Why is it you persist, incessant mirror?
Why duplicate me, to the smallest gesture
of my hand? Why suddenly reflect there
in the shadows? You, uncanny brother,
you are the other me that ancient Greek
spoke of. You’ve watched forever. From a glaze
of old and watery crystal do you gaze
at me? It’s useless to be blind. You seek
me and it’s worse that I can’t see, can’t tell;
that really is your horror, magic thing
who multiplies the cipher of our being
then sucks our blessings into your strange well.
And when I’m dead, you’ll duplicate another,
another, then another and another. . .

~Jorge Luis Borges

Why does the mirror horrify the speaker in this poem?

Prompt: Write your poem as a message to your mirror. What will you ask it? What do you need to tell it? What are the deepest fears that it brings up for you?

Possible form: A Palindrome poem, or mirror poem. This is a poem split along a vertical center where the words on the left are mirrored on the right.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Four Image

Click on the link and take a look at the image. How might this image relate to today’s theme? Write a piece of flash fiction, anything from a six-word story to 999 words. Feel free to bring in the OctPoWriMo prompt and the Photography Challenge prompt, anything that inspires your story.

In storytelling, mirroring is a technique of comparing and contrasting your character at the end of the story with your character at the beginning to show how the events of the story have resulted in change.

You may want to take a look at this article, “3 Ways You Can Use Mirroring to Craft a Resolution that Truly Resonates” from Story Embers.

Halloween Photography Challenge

Thank you so much for joining me for this year’s October challenges. Remember to support each other by visiting and commenting on as many links as you can as we explore our Deepest Fears in anticipation of Halloween.

Some music to get us moving: