LOTTERY

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

WARMUP

Image Surround

List the things surrounding your writing space, naming them not as objects or inventory, but as images. Define “image” here as a thing in a context, a thing with potential energy or relation to a past. It will help to use a longer phrase: “scissors angling at a stack of books” or “scissors glowing with reflected dawn light” rather than “scissors.” Enjoy the verbs that place objects into context and point toward animation. Let this be a warmup for your language and your image brain at the same time. 

OEDelighter

If you have access to the Oxford English Dictionary, whether in giant print or online database (check with your library), choose a word to look up. Spend time reading aloud every one of its senses and earliest instances in print. Then write ten sentences delighting in that word’s older and weirder senses or spellings. Let your word sit in the sentence the way a gem sits in a ring. 

(The OED is going to have much more volume of early instances than anywhere else, but if you don’t have OED access, use an etymological dictionary or read the etymology of a word on Merriam-Webster’s site or similar.) 

tuning excercise

passing and lurking

Make a diagrammatic diary of all the things passing through your mind today. Find a way to note which are passing and which are lurking. Find a way to note that which you have deliberately and maybe even repeatedly called to the floor. 

self-interview with digging

Do a self-interview, where you are both the interviewer and the answerer. Write it out or record yourself speaking. Focus on a few events that have shown up in your writing so far, if you’re in the middle of something, or that you’ve imagined incorporating even if you haven’t yet. Ask yourself to dig in your memory or imagination in order to surface more details and proliferate approaches to understanding the event. (See the Matthew Goulish daily teacher on approaches.) Let each question be simple and open. “Tell me more about…”

generator

ceremony of transition

In her essay “The History of Scaffolding,” Lisa Robertson writes:

We believe that the object of architecture is to give happiness. For us this would mean the return of entropy and dissolution to the ephemeral. The architecture of happiness would rehearse a desanctification of time, which is itself only a scaffolding. We live on in this temporary framework of platforms and poles, as diagrammed in the most rudimentary fashion by the letter “t.” All the ceremonies of transition take place on such makeshift plankings: judgements, executions, banquets and symposia, entertainments and recitals, markets and bazaars, funerals, births and weddings and illicit fuckings are rehearsed and performed to their witnesses on this transient stage, which is sometimes decorated with drapes or swags or flags or garland, sometimes padded for the comfort of the performing body, sometimes left bare as if to state the plain facts of life. The scaffold is a pause, an inflection of passage. It accommodates us in a shivering.

Erect a scaffold platform of some kind and write the “ceremony of transition” that takes place on it. If you want, write that ceremony as an account given by a witness of it. If you want, give it the cadence and mood of a bedtime story, or perhaps a tacit warning to the listener. Or maybe make the speaker a terrible liar.  

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?