LOTTERY

A randomly selected pool of prompts for you. Refresh the page to get a new pool. 

WARMUP

telephone solitaire

Play a game of telephone with yourself. Choose a multi-syllabic word to start from, and slide sideways until you find a lovely place to end. 

Chord Moods

This is a game for writing sentences. It plays with the voicing of different musical chords to find ingredients. In a chord, the root note is the tonic: it sets the basic tone, defines the sound. A major third is a happy, unobjectionable note hovering a little above the root. A fifth sits on top of that, bracing and giving ballast to the root. Together, without any other notes, the root and fifth together are known as a power chord. A minor third is a sad but unobjectionable and pretty hovertone above the root and below the fifth. A second jams the signal, together with the root, the sound is crunchy. A fourth lifts up from the root, curious and satisfying but a little bracing. A sixth is interesting. A seventh added to any of this lifts toward satisfaction but with the door always open. An eighth (octave) is all yes. There are other ways you could name the mood of all these intervals, of course. 

Think of a simple statement-based sentence. 

  1. Taking “root” as the primary image or substance of the sentence, write a sentence with a few extra clauses that plays the major triad: 1, major 3, 5. Root, happy hover, power ballast. 
  2. Using the same root, play 1-4-5: root, brace-up lift, power ballast. 
  3. Try the 1 minor 3 7: root, sad unobjectionable hover, bright open door. 
  4. Try any number combination you want, and really it doesn’t have to follow a chord structure so much as take a license from the way chords stack different intervals to change the mood. 

Try the same thing with a new root. Maybe with a question-based sentence, this time. 

Try to make the difference a matter of word choice. Use whatever grammatical tools are needed: compound, conjoin, subordinate, etc. 

tuning excercise

following paragraph (tuning)

Pick up a book and read a paragraph. Then close the book and write a paragraph to follow it, trying to preserve something about the author’s way of being in language while simultaneously injecting it with a tiny shadow of a different way.

What does the exercise of inhabiting a different way tell you about your own?  

letter of questions

Read over what you’ve written so far, and then write yourself a letter full of questions. Ask about the things that haven’t been included. Ask about the shadows and the edges. Ask about the things that are embarrassing or judged unworthy, that could have been here on your pages, but aren’t.

generator

possible shapes

(for a process already in progress)

Quickly sketch a diagrammatic representation of your writing so far, its elements, sections, directions. Use this quick sketch as a way to bring your attention to the question of shape. Pay attention to how many units it has, how the parts articulate with each other. Then on another page, draw two or three things in the world that share something about that shape. Is it a cabinet? A bird’s nest? A river? A box? An onion? A nesting doll? A painting with another painting underneath? For each of the two or three shapes you nominated as possessing a shared shape, write yourself notes on how the thing you are writing might grow in the next weeks to fully embrace the permissions of that shape.  

Quickly pick one moment from one of those growth notes, set a timer for 10 minutes, and write it out without pause or revision. If you finish before ten minutes, stop early. If the timer rings, find the ending right where you are.

map of the area

(for building out something that is already in progress)

Draw a compressed geographic map of the region of something you’ve already started writing or imagining. Even if it isn’t located in a coherent place, treat all the locations as neighboring. Even if your writing is abstract or unlocated, treat it as located in abstract, symbolic places. Your map can be out of scale and selective, like an advertising place-mat or the frontispiece of an old children’s book. After you’ve sketched the map, populate it with newcomers, visitors, ghosts, and legends. Who comes into this space, who lingers, who reacts? How do they pass through, where have they come from, where will they go next, in what kind of vehicle do they travel? You can include other things than people: is there a flow of goods? A migration of animals? Then write the story of one of those incursions in exactly 100 words.  

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?