Too Big To Fail

Writober 2025: Our Deepest Fears>Prompt Post

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🔗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.
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🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Giants

Did that giant rock in the forest just move? It may be a troll. That cave may hide an ogre. The sequoia may disguise a giant. Fear can cause us to make mountains out of molehills. If it happens a lot, we may be catastrophizing. Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion where we believe the worst will happen in every situation. It turns our goblins into ogres.

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a psychological intervention that emphasizes psychological flexibility, FEAR is an acronym, representing the mental blocks that create gaps between our values and our actions, that stands for:

• F: Fusion of thought – the automatic thoughts we take to be true
• E: Evaluation of experience – negative judgements and labels we place on the experience
• A: Avoidance of experience – the steps we take to avoid these experiences
• R: Reason-giving for behavior – rationalization for our avoidance behaviors

One exercise that ACT uses to face our FEAR is the ABCD Exercise to uncover our automatic thoughts and dispute them.

Exercise: Create a grid of four squares:

In the A square write the fear event. In the B square write all of the automatic thoughts that came up around that event. In the C square write the reactive feelings and behaviors because of the fear event. In the D square write what you would have rather thought, felt, and done.

OctPoWriMo

One thing I love about poetry is the way poems can manipulate time. A poem can represent the real time it takes to read it, or an entire lifetime. It can encapsulate the past, present and future, or one fleeting second.

Example Poem: “Days” by Philip Larkin from Collected Poems(Aal)

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live
They come, they wake us
Time and time over
They are to be happy in
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

~Philip Larkin

How does this poem use and explore time?

Prompt: Write a brief, condensed poem that asks two related questions. End by describing something unexpected that will happen when one of the questions is answered.

Possible form: Nonet – A nine line poem that starts with nine syllables down to one.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Day Twenty-seven 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 moving: