Two Days Without Typing

Friday Write #169

Dear writers—

I was just instructed to take the next 48 hours off of typing, minimum. What on earth am I supposed to do instead? I have no idea.

In order to almost obey this particular medical professional, I will keep today’s newsletter short and sweet. Here is your prompt:

Write a scene in which your character (who can always be you) experiences a moment of unexpected connection with another living being, whether human or animal.

Next week when I’m allowed to type again I’ll tell you what inspired this prompt. Not a bear!

This year’s Coral Beauty peony crop. Still obsessed.

Things I read this week and last:

—“A work of fiction based on real events,” Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World was kind of a mind-blower. Among other things, it tells the story of Fritz Haber, a German Jewish chemist whose method for pulling ammonia from the nitrogen in air made modern fertilizer possible and won him the Nobel Prize. But Haber also helped pioneer chlorine gas as a weapon in World War I and developed a hydrogen-cyanide pesticide that became a precursor to Zyklon B.

—Heart the Lover, by Lily King. Not my favorite of her novels, but diverting.

—Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson. I don’t think I’ve ever felt the invisible hands of a book reach into my guts and twist them before.

—“If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don’t know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.” From The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. I read this last year but dipped into it again for my NYRB-only book club. It still delights.