30-Day Accretion workshop
This workshop leads you start-to-finish to a new piece of writing, using the planetary growth process of accretion rather than one of drafting and revision —working (and smashing apart and recombining) small new layers daily in the compositional manner of an emergent planet. Each day includes a set of optional warmup exercises to get your mind moving, and a sequential prompt.
Navigate below to the day you’re looking for. Or scroll down for the workshop overview.
PDFs of individual days can be found behind the DOWNLOADS button on each post. Recommended if you prefer to work offline.
use the drop down menu to find your day:
workshop overview
ON ACCRETION
Accretion is the name for the process of planetary development from dust and gas into planetesimals and finally planets. Each day as you add to your writing, you might write forward from where you left off, write into its middle, or expand what comes before. It’s up to you how you interpret the direction of enlargement. And sometimes the prompts will direct you to agglomerate new planetesimals and then crash them into each other, producing new possibilities from their collision. The analogy is there to be useful, to offer permission to move through a writing process in a new way.
HOW TO USE THIS WORKSHOP
Each of the thirty days of this workshop includes a prompt and a combination of optional warmup, tuning, or generative exercises. The optional exercises can be found at the bottom of each day’s post.
Use these exercises on days you want guidance getting your writing mind moving; use them to find generative seeds you can weave into your writing. Use one, some, none, or all of them as you like and need each day.
SCALE AND DAILINESS
The accretion sequence is designed to accommodate any scale of project. It could be a 30-sentence essay; it could be a full-length play. The key to the accretion is dailiness. Write every day even if it’s just a sentence or a phrase. What seems like a minor contribution to your emerging writing might be the precise thing you need—and better in this context to achieve something small each day than to spew and leave yourself the task of editing and revising later. If you usually go for word count, perhaps take this time to linger, write slowly and lovingly.
It’s a daily improvisation, but beyond the resource exercises this structure doesn’t make use of pre-writing or draft stages—so think of improvisation as daily composition rather than exploratory work. It’s one draft to the end. Ideally, the process leaves you with something complete in itself every day; yet it keeps growing and changing each day too, and the collisions and agglomerations made from day to day can utterly remake the previously written material. Aim to end each writing session with a sense of completion and pleasure. (But let yourself off the hook if that’s not happening. Guidelines are useful but they’re not sacred.)