LOTTERY

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

WARMUP

alternating attention

Write a one- or two-page real-time continuous-present description of the place you are in, braiding in the running commentary in your own mind, so that you end up with a few pages of something that faces inward and outward in alternation. When you are done, trawl the pages with a pen of a second color and circle images or words that appeal to your imagination.  

minute list trawl

Do four minute-lists* of your own choosing. Go back through them with a second color pen and circle any words that please you. 

* 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. 

Circumference Tuner

Wherever you’ve chosen to write, take a few scans around your circumference. Look at what surrounds you. Make a small map of that circumference of your writing space, noting resources, suggestions, aspirations, pleasures, and tools. 

Then, after you’ve made your map, gently freewrite for five minutes or one full page, asking yourself questions about the things you’ve provided yourself with: how can you use them as you write today, whether for clarity, injunction, solance, energy, or something else? How does your space tell you something about what threads you want to follow as you write, or what discipline you want to ask of yourself? 

generator

memory recall list from Lynda Barry

This is a memory recall exercise from Lynda Barry, variations of which are found in many of her books (Syllabus is a great place to start). Choose an image or object—LB uses “cars,” and “other people’s mothers” as examples. Make a quick list of ten instances in your own life of that thing. Choose one of them to focus on, preferably one that sprung to mind as you made your list—LB always encourages us to go after anything that surfaces without overdetermination on our part. 

Draw a big X across a whole page. Visualize yourself in the presence of your chosen object so that it’s a scene in your mind. (If you chose, for example, your best friend’s car, visualize yourself in it on a particular day in a particular place instead of all the times you were ever in that car.) 

On your X-page, with a 4-minute timer going, record sensory, present-tense details of the scene. You can either write indiscriminately across the page, ignoring the X, or you can use the quadrants the X provides to locate you in space, so that you record what is ahead, to the sides, and behind you, as if you are positioned at the intersection of the two lines. 

Then set a timer for 7 minutes and, on a fresh page, write a description of the scene in the present tense.  

parable of a minor figure

In your mind’s eye, bring up someone from your writing that figures only minimally in what you’ve written, someone who would be “background” if this was a tv story. Identify where they are, maybe running an errand in the course of their daily life, nothing especially dramatic. Watch them fulfill that errand and then see them entertain a distraction; watch the way their attention moves. Then write a small parable of this figure, in which they give in to the object of their distraction wholly, leading to a deeply surprising chain of events.  

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?