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“I like the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I think… I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments.”

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

This week, we’re drawing inspiration from Miia’s Dynasty to explore the things we built, believed in, and lost—and what, if anything, remains.

For a long time, Miia’s Dynasty was everywhere—YouTube Shorts, fan-made MVs for the dramas I was watching, layered under scenes of characters loving each other badly or beautifully or both at once. When you hear it in that context enough times, it gets under your skin. It adds a bittersweet poignancy to everything it touches.

Then the other day, just streaming music, Miia’s own video came on—and I was transported. Back through all those clips, all those stories, and then further, into thinking about the different kinds of dynasties we build in our own lives. The ones we were born into. The ones we chose. The ones we were so sure would last.

It’s a little like what Adele did with Rolling in the Deep—that gut-punch of we could have had it all. The belief was real. The loss was real. And somewhere in the space between those two truths is where the song lives.

This time of year, when we’re thinking about what endures and what doesn’t—the things handed down, the things lost, the names we still speak and the ones that quietly faded—Dynasty feels like exactly the right spark.

What we build. What we believed about it. What falls. What remains.

Three Craft Notes

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“The most important thing is to prune well. And to prune well, you must know why you are cutting.”

— Unknown

This week’s writing spark asks you to examine what’s become overgrown in your work or your life—and what it truly costs to cut it back so something healthier can take root.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes from watching something you tended carefully go wrong anyway.

My chives used to be a dense, thriving cluster — the kind of herb patch that made you feel like you knew what you were doing. Then, gradually, they didn’t. Early blooming, sparse growth, a tangle so enmeshed the whole clump had forgotten how to be healthy. Meanwhile, the garlic chives spread with complete indifference to anything resembling restraint, colonizing every nearby inch of soil.

The solution, it turns out, is almost brutal in its simplicity. Cut the flowers before they seed. Divide the clumps. Pull the whole thing apart and give each smaller section room to breathe again. The plant doesn’t die from this — it comes back stronger. But you have to be willing to do something that looks, from the outside, a lot like destruction.

Gardeners know this. Writers and artists often need to be reminded of it.

A Way In

If you’re not sure where to begin, start with a specific thing rather than a concept. A paragraph you’ve been carrying in a draft for two years that no longer belongs. A friendship that once felt essential and now feels like obligation. A creative practice you’ve outgrown but haven’t yet let go of. The more concrete and particular your entry point, the more the larger emotional truth will take care of itself.

Three Craft Tips

Not sure where to begin or how to go deeper once you’ve started? These three practices work especially well when the subject matter is loss, necessity, and the things we can’t fully explain.

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

A craft prompt exploring how mirrored scenes, parallel structures, and diptych forms can emerge naturally in writing and art—and how to work with that instinct without forcing it into symmetry.

I have a confession to make. Working through a draft recently, I noticed something I hadn’t engineered. Two scenes—separated by chapters, featuring different characters—were quietly answering each other. Same emotional stakes, different outcomes. Same unspoken question, different silences. I hadn’t planned it. The mirror was already there.

That’s the thing about mirroring in creative work. We often reach for it instinctively before we understand why.

A mirror in writing or art isn’t just visual symmetry. It’s a structural echo—a repeated event, a parallel relationship, a second image that reframes the first simply by existing. A poem where the closing lines reverse the opening. A story where two characters make the same choice under different circumstances and one of them breaks. A diptych—and yes, the diptych isn’t only for visual artists; two poems placed side by side, two flash essays in conversation, two panels of a comic—where the meaning lives in the gap between the halves, not in either half alone.

The instinct toward mirroring is natural. The challenge is learning when to trust it and when to get out of its way.

Craft Lesson

The most common pitfall with mirrored structures is engineering the symmetry too early. When a mirror is built before the material has found its own shape, it tends to flatten both halves — each one bending toward the other instead of standing on its own. Write the first half as if there is no second. Let it be complete. The mirror, if it belongs, will reveal itself in revision.

A mirror doesn’t have to be exact to work. The most resonant parallels are the ones that are almost symmetrical but not quite — two scenes that rhyme without matching, a repeated phrase that shifts meaning because the speaker has changed. Imperfect mirrors carry more emotional weight than perfect ones. They create the sensation of recognition without the neatness of resolution.

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“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”

— Plutarch

This week’s prompt asks you to excavate the oddly specific, inexplicably sticky piece of trivia your brain chose to keep—and turn it into art.

I studied semantics and grammar in high school. I took German. And somehow, of all the vocabulary, root words, and linguistic rules I was supposed to carry forward, what lodged itself most firmly in my brain was this: das Fenster—the window. And therefore, defenestration: to throw out the window.

That’s it. That’s the piece of trivia my brain decided was worth keeping.

Which got me thinking: why that one? And what does it mean that our minds file away these oddly specific scraps—a word, a formula, a fact about a plant or a battle or a geometric shape—often at the expense of things we were actually trying to remember?

A Few Directions to Consider

For writers, you might write a piece in which a character is defined by the one useless thing they know—and what that reveals about who they actually are. Or write the memory itself: the classroom, the book, the moment the fact arrived and refused to leave.

For visual artists, consider what it looks like to map a brain’s arbitrary filing system—the grand and the absurd shelved side by side, the important and the trivial given equal real estate. What does that look like as a collage, an illustration, a diagram?

For anyone: the stuck fact doesn’t have to be the subject. Let it be the door.

Craft Tip: Don’t Get Hung Up on Explaining

Resist the urge to explain why the detail matters. The most interesting version of this prompt is the one where the writer trusts the strangeness without justifying it—where the odd little fact simply arrives in the piece and does its work quietly. The reader will feel the significance. You don’t have to name it.

Enjoy prompts like this?

Get fresh inspiration delivered to your inbox every Monday by subscribing to our weekly newsletter. You’ll also find new issues of great lit mags, new and forthcoming titles, recommended readings, bookstore updates, and submission opportunities.

Not all wandering boys are lost. Some are simply alone.

This week’s inspiration spark explores the quiet ache of the lonely boy, the drifting of the lost boy, and the stories that unfold when we learn to tell them apart.

Something that’s been echoing in my mind while drafting my serialized novel is the idea of “lonely boys.” Boys who grow up isolated inside their own families. Boys who move through the world unseen. Boys who learn to carry silence like a second spine.

Loneliness shapes them—but it shapes each one differently. Some boys turn inward. Some turn feral. Some turn numb. Some turn bright, because no one else will hold the light for them.

And yes—loneliness can make a boy lost, but it doesn’t make him a lost boy. Those two states look similar from the outside, but they are not the same.

Ways to Enter the Prompt

For Writers: Craft a moment where two boys (or two characters of any gender) appear equally adrift, yet the root of their drifting is different. One is lonely. One is lost. Let the reader feel the distinction before you reveal it.

For Artists & Visual Creators: Illustrate or design a pair of images that mirror each other—same posture, same setting—but one radiates the ache of loneliness while the other radiates the disorientation of being lost.

For Musicians & Sound Designers: Compose two short motifs: one hollow, one searching. Let the emotional frequencies diverge.

For Multimedia Creators: Build a split-screen moment, a diptych, a mirrored sequence—two boys walking the same road for entirely different reasons.