LOTTERY

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

WARMUP

Sound Translations

A warmup for both your mental flexibility of association and analogy, and for your language brain, especially insofar as our brains sort words for recall primarily by sound. 

Tune into the sound of the space you’re in. Think of yourself as a single point within a field of sound. Notice near and far sound. Notice sound of different frequencies. Notice rhythms and broken rhythms. 

Focusing in on now one, now another sound, make marks on a page that somehow record or notate the quality of the sound. It might be in cartoon style, it might be in abstract line, but either way, try to decouple the sound from its source, so that you notate only the sound, and not the soundmaker. Organize on the page without reference to the real space. Spend no more than a few minutes on this notation.

Set a timer for four minutes and write as many unrelated descriptive sentences as you can make by translating the quality of lines and images in the drawing you just made to words. Some sentences might literalize and transplant the sound quality. An example of this would be if I’ve drawn a tight zig zag cluster where a fly’s been buzzing around, and looking at my zigzags, I write a sentence that involves a tattoo gun. Other sentences might bounce off the drawing in a less legibly direct way, or work first through a kind of onomatopoetic sequence, first locating the sound and then finding words that use that sound and then making arbitrary sentences that use those words. 

Repair Manual

Think of something in your life in need of repair, an object, machine, or relationship. List 10-15 words pertaining to that thing, naming its parts, constituents, elements. 

Then write an enumerated set of instructions for its repair in the precise, explanatory language of a manual. You can decide for. yourself if the manual was first written in another language and then translated (well or poorly) into your own. 

tuning excercise

Something from the Empty

There’s a song by Dan Melchior* that goes isn’t it empty sometimes / isn’t it empty sometimes? / you gotta try and make some thing out of the emptiness. 

What’s a way to think about emptiness that doesn’t bog down with bad implications? What’s a way to attend with curiosity to some kind of emptiness that is an occasional or even a steady presence in your life? A dropping-away of obligations or relations that once were there. Or maybe an emptiness you perceive somewhere adjacent to your life. An empty parking lot you pass, an emptiness in a certain kind of rote transaction or professional hoohaw you have to occasionally perform.

Choose a specific emptiness that interests you. 

What would making some thing out of this emptiness entail? 

As preparation for this tuning exercise, sketch, in words or in drawing, the map of this empty zone. 

Then write in a notebook, for five or ten minutes, tuning yourself toward what kinds of making and what kinds of things you could make out of this emptiness. What would matter to you as you turned empty into something? What is the emotional, relational substance of the way you would approach this hypothetical creation?

You might think of it as a kind of repair, a restart, a gift, a ceremony, an acknowledgment. Or you might think of it with a little more wildness, a kind of decreation of decreation, an undoing that becomes a doing, an act of negation that turns a negative charge to positive. An act of presence or insistence.

Read over what you’ve written about your hypothetical emptiness conversion. Look for tasks or assignments or reminders — about what matters and how you want your making to be — that you can port into your writing day. Write some of these tasks down on an index card or post-it you can put in view of your writing space, so you can occasionally, cyclically remind yourself of these tasks while you’re working. Maybe the reminder will create a space to follow a different impulse or invitation than you’re accustomed to. Or maybe it will lend you a useful commitment.

Optional add-on: trawl your writing and turn it into a song. Borrow an old tune or trope. Embrace repetition. Play dress-up if you feel like it and write in the style of one of your heroes. Now you have something to hum as you write.

*The song is Bureau of Neurotic Grins. 

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?  

generator

scene from details

Choose a scene or moment from your last 24 hours for a quick, highly compressed study. Start by making a sketchy, diagrammatic map of the scene, with abundant notations of both sensory details and also notations of the kinds of forces and flows (of information, goods, people, power, light, water…) that influence the place. Then with a pen of a second color, circle three or four details from your map. With the map in front of you, write the scene in no more than a paragraph (or if you are writing a script, a quick one-paragraph monologue or short exchange). Be strict about limiting the skeleton of the paragraph to the three or four details you chose, but consider how those details contain information or affect from what you are not including.

Image Wheel

A generator for scenes of linked images

Scan your memory of the last 24 hours and find an image — as if seen from a hoverpoint above yourself — a resonant still that concentrates a feeling. 

Describe the image, but add a degree of remove: a mother and her child nestled into each other rather than me and my son snuggling last night, for example. 

Draw a wheel, with spaces open to write small captions at the hub and at the places where the spokes meet the rim. Write your image at the hub. 

Choose a line of connection that you can use to invent this image’s radiants. You might invent images that share some element of relation (nestlings, or generations, to follow the example image). Or you might invent fictional moments in story time when the hub image might be recalled by a character. Using this line of connection, fill in the space left open at each point on the wheel’s circumference where the spoke meets the rim. Move at speed and take whatever images come, even if they don’t align with the line of connection you defined. 

Selecting the most appealing pairs, write yourself 2 or 3 scene prompts that integrate a pair. 

Write one of the scenes. As you write, if you’re stuck (or if you just want to be fed some excess), grab a word here and there from other entries on the wheel. 

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?