Improving Misunderstanding
Friday Write #159
Hello, writers—
Today’s prompt is brought to you by Lucy Ives over at the Paris Review’s Substack. I think it’s a great one (it’s actually three). But first, here’s a picture of a giant sequoia in my neighborhood. I stood under it for a while yesterday, shivering, listening to the faint hiss of almost-hail.
“These prompts won’t solve all your problems or even any of your problems,” Ives writes. “They might make something happen.”1
Three Exercises for Improved Misunderstanding
These prompts may provoke reflection regarding the ways in which meaning stalls or, paradoxically, carries on despite unintelligibility. Certainly, they can give you some hints regarding character(s), as well as the probable location of your reader.
Another thing to consider: misunderstanding’s relationship to survival.
Here are the three exercises:
1. Write a scene in which an event is withheld from the reader.
2. Write a dialogue between two characters, one of whom cannot hear what the other is saying.
3. Create a character who sees something no one else does. This thing should either be very large or very small.
I apologize for allowing this fine writer do my work today. But at this morning’s volunteer cooking shift, the fumes from a temporary roof sealant gave me a blinding headache, so i’m not up for my usual writing-this-newsletter process, which is: 1) Spend 90 minutes trying to figure out what I’m going to write about, and then 2) Write it (anywhere from 30 to 90 more minutes). It’s a deeply inefficient system. Also I dread Step 1, which is why someone who reads this regularly should just start telling me what to write about2, because I like Step 2 a lot.
And now I’m off to read Mrs. Dalloway under a blanket (the boiler was broken during my shift, too).
Until next week!
Emily
I like her Distraction Diary one, an idea I first encountered in a YouTube comment. “A famous graphic designer (Maggie Enterrios) shared a super helpful tip when she starts working: Keep pen and paper close; when the inevitable desire to “order that thing on amazon” or “gotta find a recipe for a birthday cake” or “I should REALLY dust the shelves before I start”, you write it down for later. This satisfies the need to be distracted for a few seconds, but you don’t spiral off into DOING the things.”
I want to try this but I keep forgetting. Too distracted.
Seriously, you can hit reply and make a request.
I always enjoy your photographs (they are prompts in themselves).
An idea, maybe, for a topic: endings. How to write them, different approaches to, how to write about endings within a piece of fiction (ending a relationship, the end of a life, the end of the sugar at the bottom of a package of sour patch kids). Thank you so much for your posts: the inspiration, the feeling of community, the insights into life!
Oh we must always share the sweet prompts! Back when I held workshops, I always wondered if one day I’d read two different books and recognize a thread of a prompt offered, going this way and that…