It Seems So Alive

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

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🐦‍⬛Example poems are copied here for educational purposes.
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🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Inanimate objects coming to life

Sometimes it’s fun when puppeteers make puppets, muppets, marionettes, or ventriloquist dummies come to life through the skilled movements of their hands (and voices). But when the puppeteer is taken out of the question and things are still walking and talking, it makes one question her sanity. The object at that point must be possessed by evil, or so the myriad of stories would have us believe.

When we were children we believed our dolls and stuffed animals could walk and talk, understand our problems, and play games with us. When did that end? Why did that end?

Here’s a fun writing exercise for looking at an inanimate object in many different ways:

Writing cube exercise: I came up with this idea on the second day of April’s NaPoWriMo 2024. Terrance Hayes’s thoughts on boxes made me think of using flattened cubes to put words and phrases on. Then I can put the words on the inside or the outside of the cube, and by turning the cube, enter the poem (or any writing) from different text.

Try turning an object in your hand, looking at it from every angle. Hold it above your head. Put it below you on the floor. Write specific details of the object, using all your senses, on each square of the cube. You can add quick snippets of thoughts and memories that come up as you examine the object. Then cut out and construct the cubes and roll them like dice to come up with the order of your phrases for your poem or short prose.

OctPoWriMo

In poetry objects often come alive. Objects are given human characteristics, emotions and actions which is called personification.

Example Poem: “Field of Skulls” by Mary Karr from Poetry Foundation.

Field of Skulls

Stare hard enough at the fabric of night,
and if you’re predisposed to dark—let’s say
the window you’ve picked is a black
postage stamp you spend hours at,
sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love
Lucy reruns have gone off—stare

like your eyes have force, and behind
any night’s taut scrim will come the forms
you expect pressing from the other side.
For you: a field of skulls, angled jaws
and eye-sockets, a zillion scooped-out crania.
They’re plain once you think to look.

You know such fields exist, for criminals
roam your very block, and even history lists
monsters like Adolf and Uncle Joe
who stalk the earth’s orb, plus minor baby-eaters
unidentified, probably in your very midst. Perhaps
that disgruntled mail clerk from your job

has already scratched your name on a bullet—that’s him
rustling in the azaleas. You caress the thought,
or it proves there’s no better spot for you
than here, your square-yard of chintz sofa, hearing
the bad news piped steady from your head. The night
is black. You stare and furious stare,

confident there are no gods out there. In this way,
you’re blind to your own eye’s intricate machine
and to the light it sees by, to the luck of birth and all
your remembered loves. If the skulls are there—
let’s say they do press toward you
against night’s scrim—could they not stare
with slack jawed envy at the fine flesh
that covers your scalp, the numbered hairs,
at the force your hands hold?

~ Mary Karr

How does the poet use personification to bring inanimate objects to life?

Prompt: Write a poem about the life of an inanimate object. You could write from the objects point of view, or use the cube exercise to explore the object from many different points of view.

Possible form: The Lewis Carroll Square Poem. This six line poem of six words per line, reads the same across as it does down.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Eight 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.

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.

If you enjoy these posts and the work I do here, please head to my buymeacoffee page and show your support! Thank you so much. Every bit helps keep this site going.

Music to get us writing: