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WARMUP

minute list pairs

Choose four or five minute-list categories* but do them all as word pairs (orange car, velvet jumper, etc.).

* MINUTE LISTS are a language brain warmup. For each list item, set the timer for one minute and write as many words as you can think of in that item’s category. Write at speed and take anything that comes to mind, even if the words popping up are incorrect matches or not real words. The speed and free-for-all ethos are aimed at getting your vocabulary moving.

minute lists (7)

Choose five minute lists.* Make your own or try these: words for parts of human anatomy, words that signal understanding or misunderstanding, words that belong to a particular zone of expertise, names you could give a hothouse flower, words that rhyme with your name.

tuning excercise

Circumference Tuner

Wherever you’ve chosen to write, take a few scans around your circumference. Look at what surrounds you. Make a small map of that circumference of your writing space, noting resources, suggestions, aspirations, pleasures, and tools.

Then, after you’ve made your map, gently freewrite for five minutes or one full page, asking yourself questions about the things you’ve provided yourself with: how can you use them as you write today, whether for clarity, injunction, solance, energy, or something else? How does your space tell you something about what threads you want to follow as you write, or what discipline you want to ask of yourself?

passing and lurking

Make a diagrammatic diary of all the things passing through your mind today. Find a way to note which are passing and which are lurking. Find a way to note that which you have deliberately and maybe even repeatedly called to the floor.

generator

Decontrolling Gerund Generator

Make a list of about 30 -ing words. Start with the first one that comes to mind, and then find the next word by either moving slightly sideway in the meaning of the word, moving to an opposite meaning, or picking up on the sound and finding another -ing word with similar consonant or vowel sounds. As the momentum picks up, discard the meaning-based sideways movements, and focus only on shared or adjacent sounds (i.e. trawling becomes growling becomes grinning).

Then write a story of no more than one page that uses every one of these words in any order. Let the -ing activity coax you into vividness, bigness, or brightness. Populate your scene with many characters doing all that action.

When you are done, read it back and make notes for yourself on what has shown up in the scene that’s curious to you. Consider this showing in terms of questions raised or themes broached. Consider this showing next in terms of images. Then moods. Then select a few characters who seem particularly full of life. You can save this set of things (questions, images, moods, characters) for something new, or you might ask yourself what they could lend to something you are already writing—an appearance, energy, or amplification that isn’t currently there.

Future History Object

Make a sketch of an object. Perhaps something in your immediate environment that you might think of as a curio or could imagine as an heirloom. Now transfer that object to fiction. Let it be the only intimation of the contents of a new fictional story.

Write a short description, in a few sentences at most, of the object’s immediate provenance—where it came from, how it came to be in the room.

Then write a short description of the object’s origin—where it was fabricated.

Then write a short description of the object’s prehistory, possibly the prehistory of all objects of this particular type—how it came to exist or be invented.

Then repeat the process but toward the future, writing first where the object moves next (and by whose hand) when it leaves the room, then where the object is when it is finally destroyed or decayed, and last, how objects of this type are thought of far into the future.

Look over what you’ve written and make notes toward a point in time where this object might appear in a story, whether that’s making its way into something you’re written, or in a story that hasn’t yet been generated. If you want something more, set a timer for fifteen minutes and write a sketch of that story in a compressed overview, or write the first pages of that object’s appearance in the story. Pay attention to the ways the object interacts with the deeper-time flows of creation and destruction in the world of your story.

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks.

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now.

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment.

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”?

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them?

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others.

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it.

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?

LOTTERY