TUNING EXERCISES
Tuning exercises are designed to clarify what is important to you today. They open space to mark the subtle or not subtle changes over time in your temperament, commitments, and sense of self as a writer.
here's a tuning exercise dialed up at random:

In a Borrowed Voice
Borrow a voice to speak to you as the voice in your head, one that will narrate your thoughts back to you. The voice should be both glamorous and trustworthy, maybe a movietone voice, or a poet from another land, or a broadcaster from another century. A voice you can trust and enjoy.
In this voice, speak to yourself about whatever you’ve been chewing on or nurturing as an image to be written or area to be explored—the thing on the near horizon that you’ve been wanting to write. (This might be something new, or it might be an intuition about another layer or further unfolding in whatever you’re currently writing.) Take advantage of what your borrowed voice offers—stylish bluntness? seductive lyricism? melancholic goodness? Let the voice diagnose and clarify your intentions and tell you something about what you need to do to be able to keep going.
The point of using the voice is not only the pleasure of ventriloquism but the slightly askew angle of approach to the territory of your own mind. If borrowing a voice is uninteresting or too weird, try speaking to yourself as yourself, but as if from this place askew to your habitual centerline.
here's the full tuning exercise archive:

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

arrival
Instead of writing, today do you your tuning physically. Take a walk, lie down and breathe for two minutes, or just sit in your chair

caption meditations
Set a timer for 6 minutes and cull images or scenes from your last few days. Give each one a simple descriptive identifier (i.e. letting

tuning your monster
Somewhere once, I came across the phrase “he gave birth to a monster of his imagination,” I think in reference to a philosopher. As a

walking inventory
Take a walk. It can be around the room, your apartment, your house, your neighborhood. Find at least ten details you’ve never noticed before. Make

self-interview with borrowed voice
Do a self-interview—an exercise wherein you fully perform the role of both questioner and answerer. Start by asking yourself what’s been surfacing in your writing.

letter of questions
Read over what you’ve written so far, and then write yourself a letter full of questions. Ask about the things that haven’t been included. Ask

week reflection
Reflect on your week of writing. What has surfaced that surprised you? What approaches to the practice (time of day, duration of session, writing implements,

sounding line
Imagine your writing can work like a sounding line, going from a surface to a depth and back up again. You can think of that

the social yesterday
Set a timer for 5 minutes and try to record all the thoughts you had yesterday about your own experience while navigating any social, communal

contents of your mind
Set a timer and write for 4 minutes trying to articulate the contents of your mind as you are today—the recurrent questions, habits of understanding,

soft edge of present mind
Write one or two full pages that try to braid together your own running mental monologue with an account of what’s happening at this moment

rest and energy interleave
Do a timed writing (suggested 7 minutes) reflecting on things that give you energy and things that bring you to rest. Interleave the two directions,

Retrospection–Prospection
This is a timed writing for arrival into your day’s writing mind. Set a timer (duration up to you: 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes).