LOTTERY

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

WARMUP

Minute Lists (2)

Come up with four or five minute lists * or use the set offered here. If you’re making your own set, try to balance out specialized vocabulary (e.g. words pertaining to baking), names (real or invented), sound approaches (e.g. words starting with CH). Here are a few offerings for today to take or leave: names of childhood friends, words for types of transformation, words beginning with L, names of mountains.

* 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.

listening series

Listen for a word to form in your mind’s ear, then write it down and listen for the next. Before you start, set a length — a half page, perhaps. Try to hear the next word in your mind before it reaches your hands. Pay attention to how you usually experience the traffic between your mind’s voice and your moving hands. Do you see the words you are about to write? Do your hands seem to know what your mind doesn’t? However you write in your normal pattern, try to take this one at a slow, meditative speed, luxuriating in the mind’s ear and the still hand. Give each word ample receiving time, so that you’re not listening for full sentences or even phrases but just for single words. Let them be like beads strung on a wire; don’t let the grammar of the sentence operate in any kind of predictive way. 

tuning excercise

mind tenants

Write a list of seven things that are occupying your mind today.

walking inventory

Take a walk. It can be around the room, your apartment, your house, your neighborhood. Find at least ten details you’ve never noticed before. Make an inventory.  

generator

following paragraph (generator)

Do the tuning version of this exercise, using the writing of another author. then repeat the exercise, but with a paragraph found randomly from your own past writing. Read the paragraph. Then write a new paragraph to follow it, trying to preserve something about the original way of being in language while simultaneously injecting it with a tiny shadow of a different way.

following character generator

*The script of the exercise is below. If you lead yourself through this exercise, read each step, do it, and then read the next, and so on. This exercise relies on spending time eyes closed to summon a figure from your imagination. You can also play the audio guide for a more seamless experience. You’ll need a sheet of paper nearby.*

Close your eyes and allow a person to appear in your imagination. See them from behind. 

Follow that person. They are going somewhere. Watch them as they walk. 

Open your eyes and write down something descriptive about that person, just notes on who they are or what they look like. (It may be incomplete; don’t worry about wholeness.)

Close your eyes again. Watch your person go into a place, or space, that you cannot enter. Watch them come back out. They have something in their hand now. What is is? Open your eyes and write down what’s in their hand. 

Close your eyes again. Follow that person. How do they walk? What is the emotional tone of the way they carry themselves through the world? Open your eyes and write down notes on that. 

Close your eyes again. Follow that person as they walk. What is going through their mind? Open your eyes and write that down. 

Close your eyes again. See this person as a child, around the age of 4. What delights them? Open your eyes and write that down. 

Close your eyes again. See this person as a child of 8 or 9. Something happened that they will always remember. What is it? Open your eyes and write that down. 

Close your eyes again. See this person on the cusp of adulthood. What motivates them as they envision their future? What forces do they perceive in the world, both those that pressure them and those they could exert. Open your eyes and write that down. 

Close your eyes again. See this person as an aging person through adulthood. What are the large markers of transition in their life? Open your eyes and write several moments/events of transition down. 

Close your eyes again. See this person imagining the death they would like to have. What is their vision of a good death? Map out the room they are in in your imagination. What are the objects in the room? What is the quality of the light? Where is it? Who is there? Open your eyes and write down some of those details. 

Close your eyes and move back in time to some moment in this person’s life, any moment. They are talking. Give them an audience. This might be a person they are talking to, or it might be a theatrical imagination of them speaking directly to an audience. They are directing their speaking to someone who is not themselves.

Write what they say. Write for 20 minutes straight. Incorporate a story they tell about another person; also weave in words you circled from your warmup lists.

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?