Language can box us in sometimes. A label might be used to draw a line between me and you—but it’s not language’s fault. Words are potent, rich, and magic. They are time machines; they are teleportation devices!

And the words we choose do matter. The details pump breath into the thing.

“When we know the name of something, it brings us closer to the ground,” Natalie Goldberg says in Writing Down the Bones. “Don’t say ‘fruit.’ Tell what kind of fruit—’It is a pomegranate.’ Give things the dignity of their names.”

Writing Prompt

It wasn’t just “a cake.”

It was a four-layer chocolate cake. “Mom’s Spumoni Cake,” the recipe called it. We called it “the rainbow spumoni cake”: each level had its own frosting. Brown, pink, yellow, and green.

Green was mint, from that little plastic McCormick bottle with the red lid, the one with the peppermint extract. If my mother let me help, the scent clung to my hands all day—but at least it matched the little green stains the food coloring left on my fingertips.

The recipe lived in the 1978 Make-a-Mix Cookery book, which stood waiting inside a kitchen cabinet most of they year. The cake was available by special request: between me and my three siblings, my mother made it for many, many birthdays.

Set a timer for five minutes and write wherever this takes you: “It wasn’t just a [whatever]. It was a…”