For the next several days, you will alternate between things that are additive and things that concentrate or condense. Even if you have a strong sense of where you are going, the additive prompts can provide just a little extra breadth or an oblique angle of approach to energize your imagination of a known scene. But feel free to embrace them on whatever scale makes sense, from influencing a sentence to giving you a guiding task for the day.   

Let your writing pass through a debris field. Let it pick up some debris. Let it lose some of itself too, in the passage, leaving craters or holes. If you don’t know where to look for debris, you could go out and collect it by observing and eavesdropping in a busy place, or you could try a procedure, like taking the first quotation in every news article on a randomly chosen newspaper spread. You could also poach from your old notebooks, or perhaps if your house is a mess, take an inventory of everything out of place or control, physical and psychical, and let that come at you as a kind of asteroid field. Consider that the transmutation of debris into an element of your writing is a kind of alchemical, loving act, or at least it could be.  

TODAY'S EXERCISES

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

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 head; names for secret hideouts (real or imagined).  * MINUTE LISTS are a language brain warmup. For each list item, set the timer for one minute and write as many words as you can think of in that item’s category. Write at speed and take anything that comes to mind, even if the words popping up are incorrect matches or not real words. The speed and free-for-all ethos are aimed at getting your vocabulary moving.

pleasure note

Set a timer for five minutes and try to list anything that has emerged in your writing so far that feels felicitous to you. Use this list to jumpstart a note to self, reminding yourself of where your pleasure as a reader-maker lies. 

ceremony of transition

In her essay “The History of Scaffolding,” Lisa Robertson writes: We believe that the object of architecture is to give happiness. For us this would mean the return of entropy and dissolution to the ephemeral. The architecture of happiness would rehearse a desanctification of time, which is itself only a scaffolding. We live on in this temporary framework of platforms and poles, as diagrammed in the most rudimentary fashion by the letter “t.” All the ceremonies of transition take place on such makeshift plankings: judgements, executions, banquets and symposia, entertainments and recitals, markets and bazaars, funerals, births and weddings and illicit fuckings are rehearsed and performed to their witnesses on this transient stage, which is sometimes decorated with drapes or swags or flags or garland, sometimes padded for the comfort of the performing body, sometimes left bare as if to state the plain facts of life. The scaffold is a pause, an inflection of passage. It accommodates us in a shivering. Erect a scaffold platform of some kind and write the “ceremony of transition” that takes place on it. If you want, write that ceremony as an account given by a witness of it. If you want, give it the cadence and mood of a bedtime story, or perhaps a tacit warning to the listener. Or maybe make the speaker a terrible liar.  

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 head; names for secret hideouts (real or imagined).  * MINUTE LISTS are a language brain warmup. For each list item, set the timer for one minute and write as many words as you can think of in that item’s category. Write at speed and take anything that comes to mind, even if the words popping up are incorrect matches or not real words. The speed and free-for-all ethos are aimed at getting your vocabulary moving.

pleasure note

Set a timer for five minutes and try to list anything that has emerged in your writing so far that feels felicitous to you. Use this list to jumpstart a note to self, reminding yourself of where your pleasure as a reader-maker lies. 

ceremony of transition

In her essay “The History of Scaffolding,” Lisa Robertson writes: We believe that the object of architecture is to give happiness. For us this would mean the return of entropy and dissolution to the ephemeral. The architecture of happiness would rehearse a desanctification of time, which is itself only a scaffolding. We live on in this temporary framework of platforms and poles, as diagrammed in the most rudimentary fashion by the letter “t.” All the ceremonies of transition take place on such makeshift plankings: judgements, executions, banquets and symposia, entertainments and recitals, markets and bazaars, funerals, births and weddings and illicit fuckings are rehearsed and performed to their witnesses on this transient stage, which is sometimes decorated with drapes or swags or flags or garland, sometimes padded for the comfort of the performing body, sometimes left bare as if to state the plain facts of life. The scaffold is a pause, an inflection of passage. It accommodates us in a shivering. Erect a scaffold platform of some kind and write the “ceremony of transition” that takes place on it. If you want, write that ceremony as an account given by a witness of it. If you want, give it the cadence and mood of a bedtime story, or perhaps a tacit warning to the listener. Or maybe make the speaker a terrible liar.  

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?