accretion hub – the pelagic school

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.)

Ready to get started?

Go to day one.

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?