LOTTERY

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

WARMUP

Useful Knowledge

Before you embark on your writing day, or in a little window of time set aside to leave yourself materials for later, go outside and do something useful for the space you live in. Depending on where and how you live, this might be weeding the vegetable plot, or going to the laundromat, or sweeping the stairs, or vacuuming out the car, washing the windows, picking up litter on your block. 

When you are done, sit down with a new file or notebook page, and title it “____ Knowledge.” (Window Washing Knowledge; Litter Pickup Knowledge, Sweeping Knowledge, etc.) Then write a paragraph or two that holds and reflects upon, in a very generalized way, what knowledge of the world you possess from this activity. By knowledge of the world, I mean your understanding of how things are, how things work. There’s no need to extrapolate from this limited corner of the world to the larger world—this might be purely a discourse on how sand settles in the edges of a stairwell and the best way to sweep it off—but if this activity does present itself as an object lesson, embrace the lesson, follow its trail to other spheres of knowledge. 

Minute Lists (10)

Choose five minute lists of your own or use these: parts of a body in action (i.e. a finger curling, a liver filtering); plants with whom your body has an affinity; animals with whom your body has an affinity; words of five letters; names for new brands of socks.

*Minute Lists are a language brain warmup. Choose four or five lists, and for each, set a one-minute timer and write as many words as belong to that list as come to mind, writing at speed without pausing. Restart the timer immediately and move on to the next list. Although the list presents a rule, accept any word that your brain surfaces, even if it is a false match or a made-up word. The speed and free-for-all ethos are aimed at getting your vocabulary moving for a writing session ahead, but minute lists can also be a little like panning for gold, surfacing shiny things—names, objects, expressions—that you might want to use. I occasionally trawl my lists, circling pleasing words with a pen of a second color for easy retrieval later. 

tuning excercise

Your Languages

Use an exploratory writing session to reflect on the languages you were born into and the languages into which you moved yourself. 

These may be spoken languages with formal names. They may be languages which were yours to take on because of the product of historical drift, migration, war that shaped the place of your birth. They may be recognizable hybrids or dialects but they also might be moods within a language without a formal name but that you can identify by place or time or group. Think about the decades of your childhood, the sound of the adults around you. There may be many languages there.

These are also the languages that you moved yourself into, whether those are spoken languages you learned through study, travel, or emigration, or the languages of certain communities or trades where you belong enough to its conversation that the sound of your voice and the vocabulary of your thinking has enlarged. 

What are the principles of order, syntax, logic in these languages? What kind of concepts or descriptions are accessible through them? What are their poetics? What is possible to think in one language that is less easily approached in others? How do they create expressive energy or achieve clarity? How do they create a code of belonging? To whom does each of your languages bring you near, bring you into relation?

human observations

Set a timer for five minutes and write into what you’ve observed or come to understand lately about how humans act or feel. This could be humans in general, humans in particular groups, or a particular human. 

generator

Epigraph Heart

Grab three or four books from your shelf that have meant something to you. Scan them and pluck a sentence or two that feel vested with the resonance of the book. Don’t be too long or purposeful about it—this is a game. 

Transcribe the sentences and put them together on a page. Consider the mood that arises in each possible sequence you can order them in. Think of this page as the epigraph page of a story. 

Looking at this set of epigraphs, ask yourself what is at the heart of them. This might mean asking what connects them, or what shows up somehow, in each. This might mean asking yourself what appeals to you about them, what lessons they speak to, what truths. 

Then conjure a situation that could hold this heart and somehow dramatize it. What does it mean to dramatize something? Think of the action of dramatizing as making a container full of gateways and pressure points that draw something hidden into the open, makes it show itself. This container is a scenario, a context, a little population; this container is a holding place for an event. This doesn’t mean that you need to something “dramatic” in the adjectival sense. But it is a different project than writing something that meditates on an idea, or memorializes it. 

Write the two pages of the story that will, if fulfilled, coax whatever lurks in those epigraphs into the open—either the first two pages or the last two pages. 

Later, if you want, write the rest. 

two new figures

Do the tuning exercise, “caption meditations,” then take one of the scenes and populate it with two new figures. Follow their conversation. Try to tune it in; imagine you have no hand in its direction or content: hear voices. Tune into their relationship, their moods, their way of inhabiting this place you gave them. If your hearing-voice imagination stalls out, plant a question in one of their mouths to ask the other. Often if you just pose a question, something from your imagination will surface to answer it.

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?