From the Bookshelf

December 2025

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the December installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“The Autumn Night Is Long,” by Zhang Yuniang, in The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China, ed. Wilt Idema and Beata Grant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004)

The poem below appears in a book over 900 pages long. It’s a wonderfully rich and thorough examination of Chinese women writers who lived from about 221 BCE to 1911. The huge timespan explains the book’s length. Poet Zhang Yuniang (1250–1277) offers today’s inspiration:  

The Autumn Night Is Long

The autumn wind makes for a chilly night,
The chilly wind prolongs the autumn night.
But I so love to watch that harvest moon—
Let the clear dew soak my skirt and gown!

Flash writers borrow from poets all the time, and this 13th-century poet can help us craft a three- or four-sentence story. Notice how the pairing of autumn/chilly and wind/night in the first line are repeated and transposed in the second line (autumn wind/chilly night to chilly wind/autumn night). The pairing is closed by a period. Then, as if the speaker can’t help herself, she breaks the closed pattern with “But I so love to watch that harvest moon—.” It’s as if she’s saying, never mind all that, look at that moon. A bit of passion comes through, and we have a turn. In the last line, exuberance has fully won over: “Let the clear dew soak my skirt and gown!” That exclamation point matches the energy of the line, which is full of sensuality. “Chilly night” doesn’t make you feel much at all. But you can feel the dew soaking clothes through.

So now it’s your turn. Write a three- or four-sentence story in which you use two adjectives and nouns in the first sentence and repeat and transpose them in the second, just as Zhang has done here. You might take nature as a subject, but you can write about anything you want. Just try to keep it minimalist and staid in the first two sentences. Then, in the third sentence, bring about the turn with an interjection, such as “But.” You might end the phrase in an em-dash. In the last sentence or phrase, let all the senses come in. Pay attention to how you use punctuation throughout. What is the energy of a comma, a period, an exclamation point?   

One thing you’ll do, of course, that Zhang doesn’t, is create a narrative. Her poem is full of longing. How can you make something happen that encompasses a sense of longing? Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you want to write a four-sentence prose poem. Just follow wherever you’d like to go. And there’s no reason to write just one! You could write five in a day!

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl