Weeding the garden, mowing the lawn, or even cleaning the bathroom – we all have chores that we have to do. And a lot of them are messy and take both hands, which means you can’t write at the same time. Or can you? What if I told you that you could work on your writing while doing your chores? It’s true – just follow the steps of this personification writing prompt.

Personification Writing Prompt
for Writing While You Work

Although chores do take both hands and hard work, most of them don’t take a lot of concentration. Pulling the same weed over and over again, walking around the yard with the mower, sweeping the floor, scrubbing the shower – these are all tasks that take very little conscious thought. That means that while you do them, you can use your brain to practice plotting, worldbuilding, and characterization.

One fast and easy way to do that is through personification. Imagining that different aspects of the job have the same ability to think and feel as people do can be a great way to stretch your brainstorming skills and make your chore more interesting at the same time.

Here’s how it works.

1. Pick something that isn’t human. It could be a cat, a plant, a rock, a tile, or anything else you see during your chore that can’t normally talk or do many of the things that people do.
2. Imagine how it would think or feel about what you’re doing. Is it grateful? Angry? Terrified?
3. Apply normal social constructs to the situation. What does pulling weeds become if the plants are conscious beings? It’s a mass murder, isn’t it? And you’re pulling some but leaving other plants that you consider better or prettier. That’s an interesting thought to apply to that context. Another example would be scrubbing fungus off a path. Does the fungus see you? Or do they consider the decimation an act of God?
4. Think about reactions. How do your personified beings respond to the situation? Do they see humans and interact with them? Or do they react only by themselves and apply their own stories or explanations for what the humans did?

You can pursue the reactions as far as you like (you might even come up with something you’d like to use in a book), or you can go back to number 1 and keep running through the exercise with different targets until the chore is done.

This is great practice not only for creating unique worlds but also for brainstorming potential conflicts within those worlds. Plus, it makes the chores much more entertaining.

Have fun!

-Em