LOTTERY

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

WARMUP

Triplets

In a column down your page, write triplets in the form: ___ly  ___ing  ____s

For example, wildly oscillating notes or blankly farting genies.

Take the words that come to mind and don’t worry about sense. Try listening for the sound of the word as it approaches your imagination.

Set a timer for 2 minutes and write as many as you can. If you get stuck, push the words out through sonority alone, using “cl” or “sh” or “gr” or “w” as initial sounds. claustrophobically shallowing growls. 

Word Pairs

Warmup for your language brain. 

Draw lines so that you have three columns on a notebook page. At the top of each column, write down a letter pair. Use these or any other pair of your choice: H-D / B-A / R-L. 

Then in each column, write a list of 15 word pairs, the first word starting with the first letter, the second with the second. heady dewdrops. hard drainpipes. etc. After you’ve done fifteen pairs for all three columns, add five more word pairs that simply reverse a subset of the pairs above, converting as needed for sense. dewy heads. draining hardships. etc. 

tuning excercise

passing and lurking

Make a diagrammatic diary of all the things passing through your mind today. Find a way to note which are passing and which are lurking. Find a way to note that which you have deliberately and maybe even repeatedly called to the floor. 

the social yesterday

Set a timer for 5 minutes and try to record all the thoughts you had yesterday about your own experience while navigating any social, communal situation you were in yesterday.

generator

bookshelf as image pantry

Go to your bookshelves and open one of the books you’ve been meaning to read but haven’t, one that’s been waiting for you for a long time. Scan the pages until you find an object or image to borrow from it. Start from that object or image and write two short narratives using the same starting point. Let the first be a fairy tale. Let the second be a voiceover for a fictional documentary, in the voice of someone telling a story about the documentary subject when they were a reckless young person.

Beacons and Guides

Make a short list of people whose entrances into your life showed you something new you could do or become, something that changed the path you were on in some way. Choose one and do a memory recall exercise, trying to bring yourself back into the scene of an early encounter with that person. Use sensory detail and panorama to drive your recall. Try doing the recall in a scatter on or around a page, rather than written out continuously. 

Read over your recall of this scene, and distill the encounter into a few gestures one person makes to another: ways or relating, showing, or inviting, perhaps. Save these gestures for use in a totally different piece of writing, or if you are in the mood to stay with memory, write the scene with a focus on these gestures: scene as a dance of gestures. 

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?