WRITING PROMPTS | PROMPTLY WRITTEN

Prompt Yourself: Weekly Prompts May 5–11 (Twinning)

Writing prompts to tempt your muses

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

Ever since I discovered the Neubauer twin experiment, which separated nine sets of identical twins and triplets to different adoptive families to test the “nature vs nature” hypothesis, I’ve been a little bit obsessed with twins.

I’m not a twin, but my current work-in-progress is a novel where the main characters are identical twin brothers, one of whom impersonates the other (a queer modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night).

I can’t help but wonder if I can ever capture what it’s like to be a twin. Is it trippy, knowing there’s someone else in the world with your exact face? To an identical twin, is the idea of not sharing your face far weirder?

For this week’s prompts, lets think about twins, triplets, doppelgängers, clones, and alternate reality versions of you. The familiar, the creepy, the evil, the esoteric: this week, I want to get your take on “twinning.”

Before we get started, here are a couple of quick reminders:

How This Works

1. Use these prompts to write poetry, fiction, an essay, creative non-fiction, or an article. They are totally open…