Prompt #102

We would like a word

Good morning!

Hi, everybody. Wow, we are getting close to the end of the month and I’m starting to feel all of the feels. I want you to know that I’m thinking of ways to keep my substack going in some new version come 2026—but I haven’t cracked that mystery quite yet. Every time I think about disappearing forever, I feel a bit sad. And that’s because of all of you. Sheesh, who knew I’d find such a great crew of people out here in the ether?

Anyway.

I hope you enjoy this prompt, which I’ve brought back from the archives and which involves the communal voice, also known as “first person plural,” or the “collective point of view,” and sometimes referred to as the “royal we.”

And… here we go!

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From the archive:

I’m sure that most of you know what is meant by the term “royal we”, but just in case, here’s a definition from the Grammarist:

The royal “we” is simply the use of the plural pronoun “we” in place of the singular pronoun “I”.

So why is it called the “royal we?” Because it originated with the royals (duh). From The New Yorker:

The English royal we, or pluralis majestatis, dates to the late twelfth century, around the time of Henry II and his successor Richard I, and meant “God and I,” invoking the divine right of kings. It has since come to be understood that a monarch using the royal we is speaking for the state.

As Queen Victoria supposedly said after listening to a courtier’s tale: “We are not amused.” (There’s a lesson for all writers embedded in her words: Be entertaining—or else!)

(Yes, yes, there is also the Greek chorus, but the manner of the chorus isn’t really useful for our purposes here, so I’m skipping that.)

We in the writing community also, at times, like to use the “royal we”—using first person plural to speak as one. By writing in the collective point of view, we’re able to tell the story of a group whose members are connected in some way, through shared experiences or shared feelings. The “we” can be girls sharing a cabin at summer camp (sharing adolescence), the inmates of a prison (sharing the experience of being locked up), elderly residents of a nursing home (sharing the struggle of growing old), smokers, supermodels, people with a certain disease, outcasts, refugees… the list is endless. (The “we” can be two people, or it can be an entire town.)

The writer Julie Otsuka (who often uses first person plural) calls it:

“…the ideal voice to use when describing a community from within… It allows you to paint a bigger picture than you would otherwise if you were telling the story from a single character’s point of view.”

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Here are a few examples of the form:

From the novel “We the Animals” by Justin Torres:

We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.

From the story “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” by Donald Barthelme:

Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way that he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he’d think about it but it would take him a while to decide.

From Julie Otsuka’s novel “The Swimmers”:

The pool is located deep underground, in a large cavernous chamber many feet beneath the street of our town. Some of us come here because we are injured, and need to heal. We suffer from bad backs, fallen arches, shattered dreams, broken hearts, anxiety, melancholia, anhedonia, the usual above-ground afflictions. Others of us are employed at the college nearby and prefer to take our lunch breaks down below, in the waters, far away from the harsh glares of our colleagues and screens. Some of us come here to escape, if only for an hour, our disappointing marriages on land. Many of us live in the neighborhood and simply love to swim. One of us—Alice, a retired lab technician now in the early stages of dementia—comes here because she always has.

From the novel “The Virgin Suicides,” by Jeffrey Eugenides:

Whenever we saw Mrs. Lisbon we looked in vain for some sign of the beauty that must have once been hers. But the plump arms, the brutally cut steel- wool hair, and the librarian’s glasses foiled us every time. We saw her only rarely, in the morning, fully dressed though the sun hadn’t come up, stepping out to snatch up the dewy milk cartons, or on Sundays when the family drove in their paneled station wagon to St. Paul’s Catholic Church on the Lake. On those mornings Mrs. Lisbon assumed a queenly iciness. Clutching her good purse, she checked each daughter for signs of makeup before allowing her to get in the car, and it was not unusual for her to send Lux back inside to put on a less revealing top. None of us went to church, so we had a lot of time to watch them, the two parents leached of color, like photographic negatives, and then the five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, bursting with their fructifying flesh.

From “Then We Came to the End,” a novel by Joshua Ferris:

We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently.

Perhaps the most well-known short story written in first person plural, “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, is easily accessible online.

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TODAY’S PROMPT

1. Write a story using the communal voice, the “royal we.”

2. Remember that this voice depends on some kind of shared experience, struggle or feeling. In this way, your group is made up of people all on the same page—in agreement with what they see, hear, feel.

3. You may want to use anaphora. For instance, you could begin several sentences with the words “We knew” or “We saw” or “We had always believed” or “What we want to tell you is…”

Four hundred words max if you want me (and others) to read what you’ve posted. Go over the limit at your own risk!

See you next week!

[Photo credit: Luca Bravo on Unsplash]