WARMUPS

Get your word and image brain moving. Use as many as you need. Think of this like stretching before a run, a way of simply arriving in your writing mind without the distortion of any particular focus or pressure. Disregard correctness and intention; keep the windows and doors open.

here's a warmup prompt dialed up at random

collecting and fullness

Do a collecting warmup today. Open a book and let your eyes drop at random onto the page, scooping up words in groups of three or four. Write the words down. Alternately, take a walk through a space in which many people are speaking, and catch some of their words. No need to steer toward big words. Use this exercise to recuperate the workaday words like “and” to special status. See all the words you scoop up in their fullness.

here's the full warmup archive

Minute Lists (8)

Choose five lists or use this: words beginning with “pl”; names you could give a shopping center, words pertaining to construction sites, words descriptive of

minute lists (7)

Choose five minute lists.* Make your own or try these: words for parts of human anatomy, words that signal understanding or misunderstanding, words that belong

alternating attention

Write a one- or two-page real-time continuous-present description of the place you are in, braiding in the running commentary in your own mind, so that

haha

Write a list of ten delightful words. Then make ten jokes, incorporating them.

10 slow

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

word collection

Collect a list of 30 words. You might pluck them from the spines of books in your house or slip them from overheard conversations if

observational spill

Do an observation warmup, describing the room you are in with microscopic attention. Use only a single sentence piled and spilling over with clauses. Try

minute lists (6)

Do four minute lists* of your own invention or use these: words pertaining to drainage; words starting with Th; words that get stuck in your

map without names

Make a diagrammatic map of the room you are in, using descriptive phrases instead of accepted names, as if you don’t know the names for

minute lists (5)

Warm up with four minute lists.* Choose four categories of your own, or use these: words for bouncy things, words beginning with Q, words that

word sifter

Write a sentence at random, giving it plenty of nouns and adjectives and verbs. Then rewrite the words of that sentence into a new sentence,

listening series

Listen for a word to form in your mind’s ear, then write it down and listen for the next. Before you start, set a length

Lynda Barry’s daily diary

Do Lynda Barry’s 4-minute diary. (It’s actually 7 minutes, but I like to do a speed version in 4.) Draw a box on a page,

collecting and fullness

Do a collecting warmup today. Open a book and let your eyes drop at random onto the page, scooping up words in groups of three

alphabet triads

Do a few ABC lists: a word beginning with a, a word beginning with b, etc. Cycle through the alphabet two or three times. Then

minute lists (4)

Do four or five minute lists.* Make your own categories, or use these: words with dis-, il- or anti- as a prefix, names for next

telephone solitaire

Play a game of telephone with yourself. Choose a multi-syllabic word to start from, and slide sideways until you find a lovely place to end.

as archaeologist

Wherever you are, collect fragments of language around you. These fragments might be seen, heard, remembered, or eavesdropped. If you are writing at the very

minute list pairs

Choose four or five minute-list categories* but do them all as word pairs (orange car, velvet jumper, etc.). * MINUTE LISTS are a language brain

cognates and neighbors

Choose a central verb from your writing. Then in a column on a page, write as many synonyms, cognates, or near neighbors to that verb

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?