LOTTERY

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

WARMUP

Collector Warmup

Take a walk around the space you’re in, or the space just outside it. Collect three objects; either carry them to your desk or take sketches or pics to carry them that way. 

Imagine these objects are the holdings of a special collection. Conjure a figure who is in some way the keeper of this collection. 

Set a timer for 5 minutes and let that figure tell the story of their acquisition. 

When you’re done writing, note anything of interest or curiosity that you might want to port forward, as an object, into your day’s writing. Re object: could be an actual object, but could be a thought object too (the idea of ___). Throw the rest away. 

If you want more, make a list of ten scenarios in which that object could appear. 

10 slow

Try a sensory warmup. 10 slow breaths and 10 slow sentences.

tuning excercise

Find a Daily Teacher

Flip through a book or listen to a song (or otherwise engage with a piece) by an artist you admire, whom you are willing to nominate to be your teacher for a day. Settle on a page or passage (it can be almost at random) and re-read it, trying to imagine the process of writing it. Then take five minutes to write a notebook entry addressed to yourself, describing what you want to learn from this teacher as well as any intuitions you have about mood, source, compositional methods, compositional freedoms, ways of working—that is, about how to learn from what (and how) they do. 

today’s answers

Set a timer for 4 or 5 minutes and write an account of your writing mind and heart as you find yourself today. You might be a different writer than you were yesterday, or last week. Different in energy, in interest, in your sense of what you can do and what you’re willing to ask yourself to try.

generator

hearing a new voice

Write a description of the room you are in as you write. Root yourself in a clear first-person voice (though feel free to role-play here; you don’t have to write as yourself). Then, as if scanning with a radio dial along a continuum of time (far past, far future) or distance, see if you can tune in the voice of someone else, equally interested in this scene. Allow yourself to slide or pivot into this voice. Soften the transitional edges.

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.

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?