Questions
40 writing prompts for childhood memories
· 6 min read
Childhood memory responds to sensory and spatial prompts far better than to topical ones. "Describe your childhood" produces a summary; "what could you see from your bedroom window?" produces a scene. The forty prompts below are grouped by sense, place, people and routine, and are designed to be answered one at a time in about ten minutes each without planning or editing.
Places you can still walk through in your head
Spatial memory is unusually durable. Most people can mentally walk through a childhood home decades later, and doing so retrieves detail that direct questions miss.
- What could you see from your bedroom window?
- Describe the front door: colour, handle, the sound it made.
- What was in the room nobody used?
- Where did you hide?
- What was the coldest place in the house?
- Describe the route from your front door to school.
- What shop was nearest, and who was behind the counter?
- Where did you go when you wanted to be alone?
Sound, smell and taste
Smell is the strongest memory trigger of the senses and the least used in life writing.
- What did the kitchen smell like on a weekday morning?
- What woke you up?
- What did the house sound like on a Sunday?
- What food did you refuse to eat?
- What was a treat, and how often did it happen?
- What did your mother or father smell of?
- What sound from then does not exist any more?
- What did school dinners taste like?
People
Aim at one person at a time. Group portraits produce generalities.
- Who did you sit next to at school?
- Which adult outside your family did you like most?
- Who was the strictest person you knew?
- Who made you laugh?
- Who was considered difficult in your family, and why?
- What did your best friend's house feel like compared to yours?
- Who taught you something that stuck?
- Who died first, out of the people you knew?
Routine and the ordinary week
The everyday is the first thing to disappear from family memory and the last thing anyone thinks to write down.
- What happened every Saturday?
- What did you do after school before anyone got home?
- What was bath night like?
- What did you wear that you hated?
- How did you get money, and how much?
- What did you do when it rained?
- What was on television, and who decided?
- What chore was yours?
First times and turning points
Keep these for later sittings. They ask for more reflection than recall.
- The first time you remember being frightened.
- The first time you were somewhere without an adult.
- The first thing you bought with your own money.
- The first time you understood something about your parents.
- The first funeral you attended.
- The day something changed and you knew it at the time.
- The first time you felt grown up.
- The last day of childhood, whenever you decide that was.
Common questions
- What are good writing prompts for childhood memories?
- Specific sensory and spatial ones. What you could see from a window, what the kitchen smelled like, who you sat next to. Broad prompts about your childhood produce summaries rather than scenes.
- How long should I spend on each prompt?
- About ten minutes, without stopping to edit. Ending while you still have more to say makes the next sitting easier to begin.
- What if I cannot remember much of my childhood?
- Start with places rather than events. Spatial memory is unusually durable, and mentally walking through a childhood home tends to retrieve detail that direct questions about events do not reach.