LOTTERY

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

WARMUP

your weather style

Write three days of weather reports using baroque, preposterous words. Then add one more in a deliberate monotone. Then write one more, splitting the difference, finding a style that pleases you.

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

Relay Self-Interview

Do a self-interview (in which you interview yourself and fully answer your own questions, transcribed in a SELF:… SELF:… format or recorded as voice memo). Begin with the question, What do I need from the thing I am writing? Let each following question build on the prior answer, picking up a specific thread. Allow the path of the whole interview to take on a meander; insist only on a single line of connection between each answer and subsequent question. A handoff like a relay baton. 

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?  

generator

A derivation

Sometimes I find that I have reworked an image or a scene or a text that comes from another artist almost without realizing it. There’s a kind of incorporation, literally a sense of these things entering into the fabric of my own thinking, that happens with deeply influential works. Then there’s the inevitable ventriloquism that happens from participating in culture — from being born into a language and ways of telling stories. It’s a slap to label something derivative, but what doesn’t derive from the world it emerges from? 

This generator embraces that sense of permeability and derivation as a welcome kinship. 

The task is to deliberately interrogate and rewrite some element of a text, picture, play, song etc. that has left its imprint in your aesthetic temperament. 

Make a list of 7 or 8 intense memories from your lifetime of reading, listening, or viewing. These intensities I think of as marked by a particular kind of exhilaration that combines a feeling of belonging (These are my people!) with a sense of awe or longing (I wish I could do that!). The are moments you came into contact with something you wanted to be part of. 

Select one entry from your list, and zero in, in your mind’s eye, on some element of that piece. Make notes on what it is doing and what it is made of. What are the images in the scene, the formal tools in play, the affect on you as its audience? What materials does it use and how does it assemble them into a scene? 

Then, working from these notes, without leaving anything out, but playing free and loose with how to reconstitute them, make a new scene, or song, or image, that works and reworks all these things. 

The goal is to be simultaneously loving, reverential, and free.

After you have made this thing that out of what has come before you, read it again, keeping alive the question of what it might become. 

Walking as Occasion

Go to your bookshelves (or wherever else your old reading is gathered), and collect a series of fragments that contemplate an abstraction. (For example the idea of the soul, the self, the nature of time, the color green, the presence of the past, the experience of hunger, the idea of renewal.) 

Conjure a figure in mind. See the figure taking a walk through a site that is somehow well paired with the contemplation, whether through historical association or accessible quietude or any other line of connection. The site needn’t be an obviously contemplative place. You could write a walk for a subway platform that contemplates commute or migration. The same walk, deployed on a walk next to a river, might cast an entirely different tone on the contemplation. What about the same walk up and down the aisles of your local Target?  

Write a short piece that counterbalances the geography and specificity of the site and the steady non-narrative progress of walking with the gathered contemplative fragments. Think of the walk as the jewel setting and the fragments the jewels. Or you might send the sparkle in reverse, make the description of the grocery aisle the real diamond. 

The target of the writing is to think through the contemplative fragments, but the walk through the site is used as the necessary narrative occasion for setting the contemplation in motion. 

You may choose to signal the quotation or not. This could be an exercise in incorporation, in which case you can offer citation afterwards, if you wish.

*This was adapted from a prompt for an audio walk. See the original prompt here.

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?