LOTTERY

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

WARMUP

Chord Moods

This is a game for writing sentences. It plays with the voicing of different musical chords to find ingredients. In a chord, the root note is the tonic: it sets the basic tone, defines the sound. A major third is a happy, unobjectionable note hovering a little above the root. A fifth sits on top of that, bracing and giving ballast to the root. Together, without any other notes, the root and fifth together are known as a power chord. A minor third is a sad but unobjectionable and pretty hovertone above the root and below the fifth. A second jams the signal, together with the root, the sound is crunchy. A fourth lifts up from the root, curious and satisfying but a little bracing. A sixth is interesting. A seventh added to any of this lifts toward satisfaction but with the door always open. An eighth (octave) is all yes. There are other ways you could name the mood of all these intervals, of course. 

Think of a simple statement-based sentence. 

  1. Taking “root” as the primary image or substance of the sentence, write a sentence with a few extra clauses that plays the major triad: 1, major 3, 5. Root, happy hover, power ballast. 
  2. Using the same root, play 1-4-5: root, brace-up lift, power ballast. 
  3. Try the 1 minor 3 7: root, sad unobjectionable hover, bright open door. 
  4. Try any number combination you want, and really it doesn’t have to follow a chord structure so much as take a license from the way chords stack different intervals to change the mood. 

Try the same thing with a new root. Maybe with a question-based sentence, this time. 

Try to make the difference a matter of word choice. Use whatever grammatical tools are needed: compound, conjoin, subordinate, etc. 

minute lists (3)

Choose 4 or 5 categories for minute lists.* If you’re in the middle of a process, then let at least a few of them related to what you’ve been writing in ways that you explicitly understand. Or use these: names of car parts, words descriptive of times of day, graffiti tags real or invented, words of four syllables. 

* 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

Let it Ask Questions

If you are in the middle of writing something, or even in the hazy beginnings when something of its form or stuff has surfaced in your mind, ask yourself what questions this project might ask of you, if you will let it. Take ten minutes or two full pages to write in a slow but steady freewrite. If you get stuck or find yourself at the end of the thought, as a further question based on whatever you have uncovered so far. 

If you are not in the middle of writing something, perhaps do this exercise for something you have just read, imaginatively taking on the role of the author. What questions do you think this story or essay asked of its author? If those questions were put to you, not relinquishing the author role and returning to answer on your own behalf, what kind of project could you envision that would allow you to answer—or at least ponder—those questions? Take ten minutes or two pages in a slow but steady freewrite to answer first as the other author and then as yourself. 

arrival

Instead of writing, today do you your tuning physically. Take a walk, lie down and breathe for two minutes, or just sit in your chair and notice how your body is today. Treat it as an arrival, both into your readiness to move your mind in writing, and into awareness of what and who you are today.

generator

Light on Two Sides

A generative exercise that finds action inside of environment. Audio version of the generator included.

Write a scene grounded in the description of an imagined room—its architecture, its furnishings, and the activity within it. Focus on whatever blend of these elements most draws your interest; let your imagination inhabit the room sensorily.

As you conjure this room and this building, begin by considering its place in the world, its decade in time. Include doors but omit the room’s windows at first—let this room be artificially or magically lit. Conjure the details of the room’s surfaces and objects. Its entrances and exits. Its shelves, furniture, places of wear and places of neglect.

Now give your room a natural light source on one side only, and in your mind’s eye, populate the room, as if sending in actors to take their places. See it as a still image in heavy contrast, saturated by glare.

Now watch the image as you open up another source of light from a different wall, so that the room, in your imagination, is now pervaded by natural light from two sides. Feel the influx of light and its effect on the bodies in the room. Note the expansion of the space as it includes what is outside the windows as well as the interior of the room.

Write a short description of the room as a container or holding place for the living beings within it. Focus on the room and the feeling of the room, whether directly or via its inhabitants’ perceptions.

Find the ending of your description by articulating what that environment makes possible for human action or thought. Let that final possibility become the generative seed of something new.

swerving self-interview

Do a self-interview (wherein you pose yourself questions and then fully answer them) on what you’re interested in writing about. Let each question follow up on something specific in the prior answer, clarifying or challenging it. Part-way through the self-interview, allow your Questioner and Answerer selves to slide into two fictional (or nonfictional, borrowed) people’s voices.

Then write a new stream-of-consciousness passage in one of those person’s mind. Perhaps follow them as they leave the interview, or as they wait in line at the grocery store.

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?