Generators

Generators are short prompts for finding new seeds, images, voices — bits and pieces that might fold into your writing. Most generators here are for inventing from scratch; some are marked “for ongoing process” and are specifically framed to help expand the radius of writing that you’ve already embarked on. 

here's A Generator dialed up at random:

Make a New Edge

An audio recording of this generator is playable at the bottom of the page.

Begin with this image to help activate the idea of edge: a lake is dammed by loggers and the water level rises, so that what was the shoreline is now underwater. New grasses and plants thrive in the new shallow edge that is both water (newly) and land (before). These plants attract both grazing and swimming creatures to this special place. The edge is both one thing and another, a hybrid that supports its own forms of life. The presence of this edge changes the patterns of movement and growth in the surrounding area.

For this generator, take two story elements that were once distinct, and overlay them so that there is a new edge between them where something different can be supported, where something new can thrive.

Story elements might be two similar forms (two forms of weather, two settings, two types of stagelight, two characters, two sounds, two monologues, two metaphorical or poetic devices, two kinds of thinking). Or they might be unlike things, so that you make an edge between, say, the radio and a character’s stream of thought, between a storm and a building or between a storm and a monologue.  

Explore this edge in freewriting or in a diagrammed or cartooned sketch, tuning in to what might grow, augment, or otherwise change about each individual element in their overlap. Tune in also to what might disappear. Then experiment with placing a few existing characters, figures, or narrative fixations into this edge space, whether of your own invention or acquaintance, or borrowed from some old common fund of storytelling.

The seed of your generator is a possibility uniquely offered by this edge, this meeting place, to these figures+ you’ve placed into it. Write a scene that brings this possibility into focus and play.

here's the full generator archive:

filter approach

Make a list of images or scenes or language ideas that you’ve imagined being part of what you’re making right now, but that haven’t yet

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nesting set

Do the “human observation” tuning exercise. Then take something articulated in your tuning and invent a new character to contradict everything you just wrote. Let

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flaming beetle

If you did the list of 100 unrelated words last week, find it now. (If you didn’t, do the exercise: write 100 words, each of

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two new figures

Do the tuning exercise, “caption meditations,” then take one of the scenes and populate it with two new figures. Follow their conversation. Try to tune

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monster soliloquy

Start with the tuning exercise, tuning your monster. Then let the monster soliloquize, if you conjured one. If you instead found a monstrous inclination to

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a story guide

Visualize the world of the thing you are writing: its geographic center, its horizons. Then imagine a figure who could know about that world, perhaps

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ballad

(for expanding something already in process) Visualize the world of the thing you are writing: its geographic center, its horizons. Then imagine a figure who

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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.

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echo, exchange, erasure

Find an article about something you don’t know much about. Circle or highlight twenty words. Write a conversation between two beings that incorporates at least

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empty avenue

Take yourself, in your mind’s eye, to an empty avenue. It could be a dirt road, a suburban causeway, a city street. Follow your interest

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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?