Just read a grocery list from 1987 taped inside a used cookbook and it cracked a prompt wide open for me

Margaret Gonzalez · 2026-09-29T12:55:03.892798+00:00

I picked up a stained copy of a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook at a garage sale in Boise last Saturday for two bucks, and somebody had taped a handwritten grocery list inside the back cover from March 1987. It was just milk, margarine, bologna, Wonder Bread, and a jar of instant coffee, but the handwriting had little cross-outs and a smiley face next to "get stamps." I sat there for twenty minutes thinking about the woman who wrote it and what her Tuesday looked like, and that turned into a prompt I've been handing out to my writing group all week: write a scene using only what's on a stranger's grocery list. What random junk have you found that worked better as a prompt than anything you could make up?

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Just read a grocery list from 1987 taped inside a used cookbook and it cracked a prompt wide open for me | Creative Writing Prompts - SMM Buzz