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: Golems, the monsters we make
A golem is a giant humanoid made from clay, imbued with life, and sent on a mission of revenge. The golem is about needing a monster for personal power when we feel helpless.
As writers we can create a golem or persona to give us the power to fight our fears and write things that we may be afraid to write.
Create a persona: When facing fears in our writing, it may be easier to create a persona, an imagined person, not ourselves, someone braver, stronger, more daring that’s doing the writing. What does that person look like? Smell like? Do you have a piece of clothing or a perfume/cologne you could wear to help you become the persona when you want to be more daring in your writing?
Here’s an image I created of my persona:
She’s wild, free, and not afraid of anything. What does your persona look like? You might want to create an image and put it in your writing space. Some writers name their persona and use it as a nom de plume or alias.
OctPoWriMo
We’re getting close to the end of this wonderful journey. We’ve explored sensory detail, gone deeper connecting sensory detail with personal thought and memory, and then deeper connecting sensory detail with personal thought and memory and universal themes and symbolism. So today, let your persona take you even deeper, freeing you to explore the fears you’ve been avoiding. Let him or her sit with the discomfort and free you to write what you see, feel, want or don’t want. Let her or him ask the deep questions that you haven’t yet felt safe to ask.
Example Poem: “Neurotics” by Philip Larkin from Collected Poems(Aal)
Neurotics
No one gives you a thought, as day by day
You drag your feet, clay-thick with misery.
None think how stalemate in you grinds away,
Holding your spinning wheels an inch too high
To bite on earth. The mind, it’s said, is free
But not your minds. They, rusted stiff, admit
Only what will accuse or horrify,
Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.
So year by year your tense unfinished faces
Sink further from the light. No one pretends
To want to help you now For interest passes
Always towards the young and more insistent,
And skirts locked rooms where a hired darkness ends
Your long defense against the non-existent.
~Philip Larkin
Prompt: Sculpt a protector with your words. What does it look like? Send it out to fight a fear, to get your revenge.
Possible form: A Ballad
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
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:
Experience Writing 
OctPoWriMo Day 28. The One with Iron Fingernails
~ Oizys.
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