Writing Exercise: The Why You Dodge

Writing Exercise: The Why You Dodge

Key Techniques to Practice

1. Self-Examination Through Scene – Use narrative craft to explore a personal motivation you’ve avoided interrogating. Don’t summarize your insight—recreate the moment that revealed it.

2. Emotional Specificity – Strip away vague reflection. Root your exploration in tangible details, concrete stakes, and emotional tension that forces honesty.

3. Earned Revelation – Allow the truth to emerge through resistance, false starts, and lived experience rather than neat realization or didactic insight.

500-Word Prompt

Write a scene from your own life in which someone asked you, or could have asked you, Why? Why you left, stayed, lied, said nothing, said too much, hurt someone, didn’t fight for what you wanted. Choose a moment where you avoided the question, changed the subject, or lied to yourself.

In the scene, relive that moment without framing it from your current understanding. Enter it as you were then. Let the sensory world press on you. Let the other person’s silence or persistence corner you. Let the question surface even if it was never spoken aloud.

Your task is not to explain yourself but to show the experience of avoiding the truth and feeling it threaten to rise anyway. Let language stall, stumble, or run. Let the internal rupture show on the page.

Constraints:

• Use present tense to stay inside the experience.

• Stay in scene, no reflection or analysis until the final sentence.

• Include at least one sensory detail that sharpens the emotional stakes.

• End with the moment before you’d have to answer the question aloud.

Evaluation Criteria

Strong Response

• Evokes a moment of internal conflict without judgment or summary.

• Uses scene and sensory detail to convey discomfort, evasion, or self-deception.

• Shows the self as contradictory, reactive, and vulnerable, not polished.

• The final line opens a door toward insight but resists closing it.

• Emotional resonance lingers through silence, gesture, or implied tension.

Weak Response

• Leans on explanation or reflection instead of dramatizing the moment.

• Evades vulnerability by being too abstract or too tidy.

• Uses platitudes or clichés instead of precise emotional truth.

• Presents a clean moral takeaway or wise hindsight.

• Feels like a blog post, not an embodied scene.

Follow-Up Questions for Workshopping/Revision

• Where were you protecting yourself in the writing?

• What emotional texture is missing from the scene?

• What did your body do that your mind couldn’t articulate?

• Did you let the other person in the scene have agency or unpredictability?

• How would the scene shift if you let yourself answer the question out loud?

Recommended Reading

“Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion, an essay that dramatizes personal reckoning through precise sensory recollection and emotional ambivalence. Didion doesn’t explain her motivations so much as re-inhabit the moment before she fully understood them, letting place, gesture, and tone carry the deeper truth.

AI Disclosure Statement:

This writing prompt was created in collaboration with ChatGPT, an AI model by OpenAI, to support creative practice. ChatGPT assisted with idea generation and drafting; the final text was edited by the author. The illustration was created using Google Gemini.