Author Margaret Atwood supposedly once said, “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” With a new book, “Fierce Encouragement: 201 Writing Prompts for Staying Grounded in Fragile Times,” author and writing coach Jena Schwartz wants to inspire writers to build their own creative practices, no matter if the result isn’t entirely perfect.

The book is set up such that a reader (well, writer) should choose a prompt, read it, then follow it for 10 minutes, unless otherwise specified. Many of the prompts ask the reader to consider something — an exit, a twist, the color blue. (“If you get lost, you can always default to something like blah blah blah blah until other words come, which — and this I promise you — they always do,” Schwartz writes.)

Some prompts are straightforward, only a single sentence: “Tell me where in the world you were,” says one. “Tell me what you see in the mirror,” says another.

Some are more complex: “Tell me what you wonder about;” “Tell me about being in the wrong;” “Tell me about being the change.”

Each prompt comes with an epigraph and some introductory text — sometimes a poem, sometimes an anecdote from Schwartz’s life. At times, the stories get very vulnerable, touching on Schwartz’s experiences with parenthood, divorce, and bulimia.

Sometimes, they also offer poignant quotes: in “Broken Glass,” Schwartz says, “Overthinking is like feeding your inner critic fresh grapes by hand.” In “The First Time You Prayed,” she defines love as “the air we’re both breathing, the spaces between syllables, the unspeakable, the unknowable, and the obvious. It has no agenda. It is the multiplier of mystery and the sum of its parts. It is safe border crossing, and it doesn’t require a signature if you’re not home.”

By the way: why 201 prompts instead of an even 200? Schwartz, who lived in Amherst for over four decades and moved to Longmeadow last year, was thinking of a line from an Emily Dickinson poem, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” which became the inspiration for the second prompt in “Fierce Encouragement.” Since the book overall encourages readers to put words to paper without worrying if they’re perfect, the number made sense, she said: “201 has that feeling of being a little not neatly wrapped up.”

And what is “fierce encouragement” specifically? That title – which also shares its name with Schwartz’s coaching business – refers to a sense of a “really unwavering, focused quality of encouragement that’s more than just pom-poms.”

“That fierceness,” Schwartz said, has “this quality of, ‘I’ve got you, I’m in this with you, you’re not alone’” and “is really about saying, ‘I’m gonna keep showing up for you’ and encouraging people to really keep showing up for themselves.”

Interestingly, one chapter of this book contains no writing prompts – instead, each entry is a “Not-Doing Activity,” like watching a sunset or staring at the ceiling. Schwartz wasn’t sure if she should include that chapter at first, but ultimately decided against her own doubts.

“I left it in because I wanted to integrate and normalize not writing and not pushing as part of a bigger creative process and the importance of that, the importance of taking time and learning how to let that count, whether that’s taking a walk or taking a nap or sitting on a bench.” The writing process itself, she said, is “not only about getting words on the page. I really wanted to bring in that permission and gentleness, too.”

In the book’s very last chapter, Schwartz asks the reader, “Tell me about the ancestors, and the ones to come.” She’s motivated by the Hebrew phrase “l’dor v’dor,” meaning “from generation to generation,” and while she was out for a run one day, she had an image of her ancestors cheering her on.

“And it was in that moment,” she wrote, “that I realized: Maybe courage is not a thing we have to conjure. Maybe courage is our birthright. Maybe courage comes to us through our DNA, in the songs of birds, and the memories that live in the forests and ocean waters and our very bones.

“Ending with the ancestors in the book is a way of acknowledging both the past, but also the future, and just knowing that whatever I bring forth and offer to the world is part of this long infinite chain, and there’s something really special for me about placing myself in a context that’s much bigger and older than I am,” she said.

Schwartz didn’t even set out to make a book of writing prompts when she started what would eventually become “Fierce Encouragement.” She wrote the book’s first 10 prompts as part of a writing group she was leading in December 2014; she wrote the next 10 for a group she led the following month. As time went on, she found herself writing more and more prompts. By the time the pandemic hit, she said, “I had all this creative material that was just sitting there on my computer. I thought it would be really wonderful to make all of that available to people.”

The origin story for her own book, as it happens, matches nicely with the philosophy that Schwartz has for writers: “Start anyway and keep going and let everything count, because you never know where it’s going to lead.”

“Fierce Encouragement: 201 Writing Prompts for Staying Grounded in Fragile Times” is available for $18 paperback or $8.99 on Kindle via Amazon and BookBaby.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.