Friday Write #082
Hi! This is Good Ideas, a newsletter about writing, creativity, and craft, with biweekly prompts designed to help you make progress in your current writing project. If you’re not working on something already, the prompts will help you start; all you need is twenty minutes and a pencil.
Greetings, writers—
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Well, it’s no longer National Poetry Month (May is Mental Health Awareness Month, National Bike Month, and Zombie Awareness Month, among others; and today, I just learned, is trying to become 503 Day1), but we’re turning to poetry for today’s prompt anyway, because I found a copy of Matthew Dickman’s 2018 poetry collection, Wonderland, on a shelf at my office space, and because poetry belongs in every month of the year, obviously.
In Wonderland, there are five poems called “Wonderland” and thirteen poems titled with hours of the day. The “Wonderland” poems feature a character named Caleb, who becomes more troubled and troubling as his story unfolds; the “hours” poems use a single word or phrase to begin each of line. Every line in “ONE A.M.,” for example, beings with “I went.” The lines in “TWO A.M.” all start with “I lost.”
Here are the first lines of “ONE A.M.”:
I went outside to see if I was there.
I went around the corner of the first time we met.
I went into your bedroom and found a little bit of night but just enough.
I went and got sick and now I don’t know what to do.
I went to school and was punished.
I went to school and sat in the coatroom and was on fire.
Today, borrow this strategy from Dickman (who was born and raised in Lents, and is thus the perfect poet for a semi-fictional Portland holiday) and write something that repeats a phrase over and over. You can write it as a list (or poem) going down the page, as Dickman does, or as a refrain, or however else you want to use and reuse it.2
Here are the rest of Dickman’s phrases; pick one or come up with your own. “I remember” is always a good one, and I’ve probably suggested it before.
THREE A.M. — “The light”
FOUR A.M. — “I made”
EIGHT A.M. — “I happened”
NINE A.M. — “I don’t know”
NOON — “I stayed”
THREE P.M. — “This”
FOUR P.M. — “I wonder”
FIVE P.M. — “I heard”
SIX P.M. — “This”
EIGHT P.M. — “I could”
MIDNIGHT — “Now”
Happy writing—
Emily
And now, a few writing-adjacent links:
Remember to move your body. “Walking, whether it was inside or outside, raised subjects’ creative output by 60% on average, compared with sitting still.”
How to be an artist.
“W. H. Auden says that everyone secretly loves his own handwriting the way everyone secretly loves the smell of his own. . . .”
“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either…It’s to escape all that—to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others.” A review of a “major minor classic” that I read recently and totally loved, by a woman who called for the need for a room of one’s own before Virginia Woolf did.
h/t to Monica at The Writers’ Block for knowing these kinds of things
If you’re working on a novel/story already, use this as a way of getting deeper into your characters. Write as one of them. Make a list of what he/she wonders, doesn’t know, or remembers, etc.