Through this Banned Book Writing Prompts series, Teachers & Writers Magazine aims to push back against the growing movement to censor what students can read and to show what happens when we enthusiastically embrace banned works rather than fear them. You can read an introduction to this series by Susan Karwoska here, and you can find more Banned Book Writing Prompts here.

From the start, the language in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is arresting. Mythical in depth and lyrical in the telling, the novel’s first few pages set the tone and give us everything essential we need to know about Hurston’s vision in this book. In the third paragraph, the narrator tells us: 

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgement.

Like Ulysses, the novel’s heroine is returning home, and Hurston’s opening signals to the reader that they are in for an epic.

I can’t remember when I first discovered this novel. It’s one of those I can, and have, read again and again. Each reading has reconfirmed there is so much to gain from this American classic—certainly a richness and depth that should not be kept from young readers and writers.

Hurston’s subject is something that I think is still radical in the 21^st century: a woman who defies the norms of her upbringing and community to pursue her own happiness. So often a story of someone going against the grain dwells on the shame of it, the trauma, the tortured deliberation and difficult choices. Women, especially, are expected to conform, historically denied the option for self-determination enjoyed by men. And for Black women who, at the time the novel was written, were still in living memory of enslavement, who lived in policed sundown towns in the Jim Crow South or red-lined neighborhoods in the bigoted North, I imagine conformity was a survival tactic not only for oneself but for one’s community. 

And then there’s Janie, the heroine of Their Eyes Were Watching God, who looks down the road of the unhappy life she’s been told she must live and says, No. Unapologetic, untortured, and unashamed. And she does it twice! She chooses love and her own happiness. The characterization is so strong that Hurston makes Janie’s choices seem absolutely correct, natural, essential. That’s what feels radical about the novel to me. The unfussiness with which Janie chooses joy.

Their Eyes Were Watching God says joy is our birthright. It reminds me that we are ALL entitled to joy. But to have it, we must choose it . . .

Toi Derricotte said, “Joy is an act of resistance.” Their Eyes Were Watching God says joy is our birthright. It reminds me that we are ALL entitled to joy. But to have it, we must choose it, choose it even in the face of well-meaning loved ones or ill-intentioned people who want to control us through fear. We must, the novel asserts, choose joy, and on our own terms.

Like Janie, Hurston chose to live and make art on her own terms, and Their Eyes Were Watching God is a testament to that. Hurston, who was both a folklorist and writer, doesn’t just tell a story; she makes the novel a vehicle for capturing the lyrical voices of Black people. The African American Vernacular (AAVE) may take getting used to for the reader who’s unaccustomed to it. But the effect, when you do fall into the rhythms of it, is the delight of a fully immersive experience.

Hurston will often take pauses from the forward motion of the plot to let the reader savor a moment of everyday life in this world. When the townspeople are playing the dozens on the porch or attending a donkey’s funeral, we readers get to come along for the ride; we’re invited to the party. In these moments we see Hurston the anthropologist and folklorist at work. She is showing us the intricate beauty of this culture and people.

Hurston was a visionary in recognizing the need to preserve this history. And she did so with fierce devotion and love.

I should point out that Hurston’s novel was not well received by the Black intelligentsia of her day. Their Eyes Were Watching God was criticized for what was considered a sentimental depiction of Black life that pandered to white audiences. In a scathing review, Richard Wright wrote that Hurston employed “the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh,” and that her characters were limited to the “narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.”  

A contemporary audience can see beyond the politics of the Harlem Renaissance and appreciate the lyricism and love Hurston puts into the novel. Alice Walker’s words are the best answer, decades later, to Wright’s criticism. Walker writes:

Reading Their Eyes Were Watching God for perhaps the 11th time, I am still amazed that Hurston wrote it in seven weeks; that it speaks to me as no novel, past or present, has ever done; and that the language of the characters, that “comical nigger ‘dialect’” that has been laughed at, denied, ignored, or “improved,” so that white folks and educated black folks can understand it, is simply beautiful. There is enough self-love in that one book—love of community, culture, traditions—to restore a world. Or create a new one.

Today, when some are making attempts to systematically erase Black culture and history from mainstream education, this intimate portrayal of Black life must be protected. Hurston was a visionary in recognizing the need to preserve this history. And she did so with fierce devotion and love. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a confection, rich with wonderful figurative language, both in the AAVE of the characters and in Hurston’s lush narration. It is an American masterpiece and a masterclass in storytelling that we should celebrate, not hide from today’s readers.

Writing Prompt 1
Footprints in the Sky: Playing with Personification

Hurston’s use of personification is inspiring—in her descriptions, the natural world is so vivid it becomes another character. Whether you’re reading the whole book with your students or not, looking at an excerpt from Their Eyes Were Watching God can be an excellent way to introduce and explore personification as a literary device. 

It can be especially helpful for students writing fiction to think about how they can get more out of their descriptions of setting, using figurative language in the setting to reinforce characterization or build plot tension.

Here are a few examples of personification from the novel:

The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. 

The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

The wind through the open windows had broomed out all of the fetid feelings of absence and nothingness. 

Every morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun. 

[describing a flooding river] The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters. . . . The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.

Exercise

Have your students pick out an element of nature: sunlight, shadow, fog, wind, clouds, rain, snow, waves. You might have them call out suggestions and write a list on the board for each student to choose from. Intangible things make good choices here. They could go with something tangible like a tree, but not an animal. 

Invite your students to pick a feeling for their element of nature: scared, scary, joyous, lazy, sneaky, sad, hopeful. Again, making a list to choose from might help a reluctant student.

To personify the element of nature, we must make it act like a person, so ask your students to write how a person might act or move when they feel the emotion they chose. You might do one together as a class to show them how it’s done. For example, how does a sleepy person move?  They might drag their feet, blink slowly, yawn. They might sigh loudly. They might flop onto a sofa. For younger students, it could be fun to have one student act out the feeling while the others describe it.

Once your students have written two to three actions for their emotion, ask them to write a sentence describing their element of nature doing one of those actions. They can write their description stand-alone, e.g. “The clouds dragged their feet across the sky. . . .” Or they can write it from the point of view of a character observing it: “Jenna watched the clouds drag their feet across the sky.”  

At this point, where you take the exercise depends on the level of the students. Here are some ideas:

• Give your students time for free writing, using their personification as the launch point. 
•  POETRY: Turn the sentence into a poem. Build onto the personification with more actions (turning it into an extended metaphor). Ask the element of nature why it’s acting that way (Cloud, why do you drag your feet across the sky?). What does it answer?
• FICTION: Write a scene incorporating the personification to describe the setting. Consider if the personification matches the main character’s emotion or evokes it. For example, if the trees lean forward menacingly, is it because the main character feels afraid or murderous? Have your students think about how the personification and setting in general contribute to characterization and/or building tension in the plot.

Writing Prompt 2
Leaving home: Looking at Character Motivation

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie chooses to leave her first husband and later the town where she has lived all her adult life. Leaving home is an emotionally charged action. It has so many emotional possibilities—one can leave in anger, in hope, in regret. It makes an excellent launching point for a story because the setup of leaving something familiar for something new already has a lot of tension baked into it (think Joseph Conrad and the Hero’s Journey), and tension is what drives a story forward. 

This exercise is helpful for encouraging students to think about how motivation can contribute both to characterization and to plot. Motivation tells us a lot about a character—what makes them tick, what’s compelling enough to move them to act. And that motivation should drive the plot forward as the character seeks what they desire through escalating challenges.

Exercise

Write a scene in which a character is leaving home by choice. If the students need a starting line to get going, they might try this:

The door closed and [character’s name] turned to face the road.

If students are able to write readily, this may be enough to get them started. If they need more scaffolding, you might have them answer some pre-writing questions first. 

• Who is the character? Name, age, background, other traits. As an option, you might hand out photos of people from magazines or printed from the internet and have students use the person in the photo as their character. (Thank you to Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa for introducing me to that approach!)
• What is their home like? Setting, time period, etc.
• Why have they chosen to leave home?
• Do they know where they’re going? (They don’t have to!)
• How do they feel when the door closes behind them and they look at the road ahead?
• What do they see in front of them?

Follow this pre-writing with ample time to draft a scene. Let your writers know that if the drafting takes them away from the pre-writing answer they had already written, it’s OK. The main thing is to keep the emotion and motivation of the character central throughout the writing. 

This can be done as practice writing, or students can build on this scene to develop a longer story.