LOTTERY
A randomly selected pool of prompts for you. Refresh the page to get a new pool.
WARMUP
two-tone etude
Write a tiny narrative of a fictional event that uses only words beginning with two letters of your choice. Borrow a bit of letter-color synesthesia and imagine that, for example, all words beginning with e are a purply grey-blue, and all words beginning with j are bright orange, and use only words beginning with e or j: make tiny a two-tone story. Let the difficulty of the constraint maximize the weird, free-range exactitude of the chronicle you can tell. This is a minute list in disguise; the point is to wake up your vocabulary.
minute lists (4)
Do four or five minute lists.* Make your own categories, or use these: words with dis-, il- or anti- as a prefix, names for next year’s popular shades of paint, words pertaining to hardware, words beginning with the letter G, onomatopoetic words for wilderness sounds.
* 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.
tuning excercise
soft edge of present mind
Write one or two full pages that try to braid together your own running mental monologue with an account of what’s happening at this moment in the place you are in. Be soft with the edges. For fun, if you want, occasionally play with misattribution across the inside-outside barrier. For example, the refrigerator his humming but maybe I will say that it’s I who am making a little frequency symphony. Or that the refrigerator is trying to come up with examples of a what could be written on the fly. Or perhaps that the refrigerator, and not the puppy, is snoring.
Sticky Things
Freewrite for a few minutes or half a page, trying to recall some of the sticky things that have been circling your mind recently. Things you come back to. Anxieties but also hopes. You can use the fill-in-the-blanks formula “I’ve been thinking about _____” to keep the freewrite moving.
Turn this list of sticky things into fodder for big questions you can ask a character or figure in your writing. Then spend ten minutes writing a dialogue between you and your character that begins with this question and follows from there. Let your character approach the question, the sticky thing, in their own way. Use the dialogue as a tool for clarifying your own relationship to the sticky thing by juxtaposing it with a totally different relationship.
When you’re done, ask yourself if anything that’s come up might add movement or energy to your writing. If so, make a note of what it is.
generator
Populate the Silences (2)
A concept from Deep Listening is that we are always listening to both sound and silences. Listening for silence is thrown into relief with hypotheticals. For example: look up the clouds and then imagine the burst of noise of fireworks bursting in the sky right where you are looking. If you could not hear the present silence, then you could not hear the fireworks that could populate that space of silence. Silence as a space of potential.
In this prompt, think of silence as an empty expanse that might house something. It might be sonic but might also be visual or spatial.
Write a scene for a particular place or type of landscape. If you can’t think of one, borrow one of these: the food court at a mall, a waiting area for a commuter ferry, an alpine base camp, a dog park.
Something conversational is taking place in the scene—perhaps two people are debating what’s going on inside their pet cat’s mind or hashing out a complex plan to infiltrate a cult. You can poach this conversational something from somewhere else — it’s really only there to help define the space while you work. If you are in the middle of writing something, perhaps you can poach the conversational something from what you’ve already written.
As you write the conversation, tune into the silences that surround the speakers. Look for places within the scene to populate those silences with sound. Let this generator teach you something more about the place where your scene unfolds. The conversation seem at first to be the center of the scene, but stay open to the possible grown—in energy, interest, focus—of the silences around them as they populate.
(This generator is adapted from an Audio Walk prompt which draws on a Deep Listening exercise. See the original post for more on the source.)
ceremony of transition
In her essay “The History of Scaffolding,” Lisa Robertson writes:
We believe that the object of architecture is to give happiness. For us this would mean the return of entropy and dissolution to the ephemeral. The architecture of happiness would rehearse a desanctification of time, which is itself only a scaffolding. We live on in this temporary framework of platforms and poles, as diagrammed in the most rudimentary fashion by the letter “t.” All the ceremonies of transition take place on such makeshift plankings: judgements, executions, banquets and symposia, entertainments and recitals, markets and bazaars, funerals, births and weddings and illicit fuckings are rehearsed and performed to their witnesses on this transient stage, which is sometimes decorated with drapes or swags or flags or garland, sometimes padded for the comfort of the performing body, sometimes left bare as if to state the plain facts of life. The scaffold is a pause, an inflection of passage. It accommodates us in a shivering.
Erect a scaffold platform of some kind and write the “ceremony of transition” that takes place on it. If you want, write that ceremony as an account given by a witness of it. If you want, give it the cadence and mood of a bedtime story, or perhaps a tacit warning to the listener. Or maybe make the speaker a terrible liar.