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accretion (day 13)

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Today, give attention to energies in your material: speed, friction, attraction, repulsion, heat, spin . . . 

Options, depending on what kind of momentum you have: 

— Always the option to simply expand. (Remember you can graft a new branch, fill out a thin place, add on to the end or write a prologue. Think spherically when it’s compelling to think that way (spherically as in a planet slowly growing from its center in all directions). When that feels forced or irritating, just write forward.)

— If acquiescing to a structure is working for you, try this: grow a second planetesimal. Following the planetary accretion metaphor, collision will be a feature of the late stages of development. So you build chunk #2 (or #3 if you’ve sprouted other centers already) in preparation for the eventual collision with #1. What is a “second planetesimal”? It could be a new strand of story, a counter narrative, or something that feels totally outside what you’ve written so far. Or maybe you find yourself with lots of weird little lumps of rock with no clear center. That works for the collision course too. If you’ve got lots of little bits and pieces, perhaps choose two to increase in size and write into both over the next few days.  

TODAY'S EXERCISES

use one, none, some, or all, as needed

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 beginning of the day, you might try to capture whatever still remains of your dreams, or of anything that’s been circling through your head. Once you have a small set of fragments, consider them as if they are fragments of some long forgotten piece of writing and you are an archaeologist. Meditate on them. Instead of generating and spewing words as a vocabulary warmup, this warmup is about tuning into the resonance of a few words or phrases in front of you—trying to get a read on all the life and action attached to them. You might take one or two fragments forward into your writing today, or you might just have woken up a more careful ear for the small elements nestled in your sentences.

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 the dog out this morning at 5:19) and then describe the image or scene in a few rich sentences. You won’t capture everything about it, but try to meditate briefly on the image/scene before you write so you can tune into what is meaningful or beautiful about it.

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.

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 beginning of the day, you might try to capture whatever still remains of your dreams, or of anything that’s been circling through your head. Once you have a small set of fragments, consider them as if they are fragments of some long forgotten piece of writing and you are an archaeologist. Meditate on them. Instead of generating and spewing words as a vocabulary warmup, this warmup is about tuning into the resonance of a few words or phrases in front of you—trying to get a read on all the life and action attached to them. You might take one or two fragments forward into your writing today, or you might just have woken up a more careful ear for the small elements nestled in your sentences.

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 the dog out this morning at 5:19) and then describe the image or scene in a few rich sentences. You won’t capture everything about it, but try to meditate briefly on the image/scene before you write so you can tune into what is meaningful or beautiful about it.

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.