LOTTERY

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

WARMUP

object description

Find a few objects and arrange them in front of you. Spend five minutes writing a description of the scene. Perhaps approach it from the context of sourcing: what has arrived into this scene and what are all the steps in its production that brought it here? Feel free to invent what you don’t know about its history. 

ostentatious labeling

Draw a map of the room you are in including its many objects. Label each one in a baroque, ostentatious manner. Where you could use one word, use four. Let this serve as your vocabulary warmup for the day. Perhaps publish a few confessions by way of these wordy labels. 

tuning excercise

For Stuck Places

Deborah Hay, a lifer of the experimental dance world, uses questions and mantras worked over long periods of time as a steady underscore to each season of her dance practice. She might play one question in mind for a year, and have collaborators tune themselves to that question too, so that it becomes an active sub-strata in a dance, an instrument for opening up ways of moving or becoming aware of possible choices. 

This was one of her questions when I took a workshop with her one year, and I have played the question ever since as it recurs to mind: What if where I am is what I need? 

Use this question any time, but especially for stuck places. Use it to pivot the angle of your vision on your own inhibition, blockage, stoppage, dullness, confusion, or boredom. The question fruits when you ask, what do I need here? To find that answer, you have to ask, what’s actually here? Can you derive any kind of freedom or nutrition or provision or ongoingness from this place you’re in?  

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

map of the area

(for building out something that is already in progress)

Draw a compressed geographic map of the region of something you’ve already started writing or imagining. Even if it isn’t located in a coherent place, treat all the locations as neighboring. Even if your writing is abstract or unlocated, treat it as located in abstract, symbolic places. Your map can be out of scale and selective, like an advertising place-mat or the frontispiece of an old children’s book. After you’ve sketched the map, populate it with newcomers, visitors, ghosts, and legends. Who comes into this space, who lingers, who reacts? How do they pass through, where have they come from, where will they go next, in what kind of vehicle do they travel? You can include other things than people: is there a flow of goods? A migration of animals? Then write the story of one of those incursions in exactly 100 words.  

We Approach

Write a scene of approaching something from a distance. Track each perceptible detail in turn as it arrives, or transforms from a prior perception into a new one. Write in in the first person plural “we.” At the end of the approach is the arrival. Into what? 

If you want more, re-write the scene of approach from one or both or all individual perspectives that were once bundled into the “we.”

If you want to add a formal constraint, as you write, try braiding appearance and interpretive or associative thought together into twined sentences. 

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?