Photo courtesy of Lucy Ives.
Novelist and critic Lucy Ives began compiling writing prompts, sometimes spontaneously in the classes she taught. The clues grew to a collection of three hundred and sixty-five, which will be published as a book this year. We would like to share some of them with you here. They are very precise prompts, many of which aim to activate your memory or descriptive abilities; they are suitable for writers of all ages and experience levels. You’ll need a stationery and a surface, and sometimes a smartphone or computer, but most of the work actually happens in your head. Ives wrote, “These pointers won’t solve all your problems or even any problems. They might just make something happen.”
Disorder Diary
If you work at a computer, note down what you’re thinking about during times when, instead of getting on with a task, you tend to do “frivolous” or “unnecessary” things, like scrolling through social media, stalking esoteric DJs, or browsing eBay. Jot down your thoughts and impulses in these moments. Consider allowing note-taking to replace activities you thought you would do. Remain aimless, if possible. Observe, explain; write things you don’t want to write and think things you don’t want to think.
Practice for Fluency
Write a story in which the narrator refuses to tell. Let the narrator barely tell the story—perhaps too eager to tell the story, speculating about how fun it would be to tell the story, stumbling and almost telling the story, trying (and failing) to talk about other things.
Taste Test
Write a detailed explanation of the process of drinking a glass of water, eating an apple, or the act of swallowing another small piece of food. Renovate your conception of what an event is.
The Mystery of Scale
It’s an exercise designed to encourage one to rethink the relationship of time and narrative—and, most importantly, how events occur in writing.
Try one or more of the following:
1. Write a novel that takes place in three sentences. The plot must begin, unfold, and end.
2. Write a three-page novel. All actions and events should be represented in this space and your three-page novel should have at least one of the characteristics of a more “standard” novel: revelation, reversal of fortune, love and loss, adventure, self-dissolution, crime, redemption, transformation, and so on.
3. Write a two-page sentence. If possible, these sentences should not tell a story but rather should have all the features of a sentence: be contingent entities that play roles and not attempt to say everything that might be said.
4. Write a sentence thirty pages long. If you can do this, you are ready for the big leagues!
5. Write a hundred word story. Set it aside for three months, then come back and develop it to about seven thousand nine hundred words.
Try to find other matches that may be inappropriate or risky in terms of quantity of writing and genre.
Zwicky Box
The method is based on a matrix device identified by Swiss Bulgarian astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky (who incidentally discovered dark matter). You can use this method for many things, but just think of it as a tool for writing stories.
At the top of your matrix/spreadsheet, write a series of categories, such as “Location,” “Issues,” “Disadvantages,” “People,” “Genre,” “Weather,” and so on. This will be your column title. Now, fill each column with different content. If I fill in the “Location” column, I might try things like:
At home
above the clouds
Philadelphia
Urmia, Iran
the next fifty years
Manhattan in the nineties
Etc.
Once I’ve filled in all the columns, I’ll create a series of different combinations, taking one item from each column to produce a set of qualities for a story, taking place in Philadelphia, covering a global health crisis, about divorce, concerns artists, written in picaresque form, and featuring a meteor shower, for example.
Keep exploring combinations until you find one that feels completely impossible or strange and unexpected or obvious to you.
Write this story.
Guide
Draw a floor plan of a house, apartment or other building. Make these diagrams more or less detailed, depending on your preferences, and include doors, windows, furniture, or other content.
Now write a story about what happened here, making significant use of diagrams.
Outline
Watch movies without sound.
Make a verbal transcription of what you see. Even if you know the names of the characters and what is known to be happening, try to keep your descriptions of the action, protagonists, and scenery as neutral as possible.
“A young person staring into space in a gray room.”
“A red car slowed down near a pile of blue rocks.”
Then, use the objectivity you’ve been trying to develop to understand your own perceptions without judgment. As you review this writing, see what kind of narrative you lent to the film—relationships, motivations, desires that you (and only you) can understand.
Snail Story
This is an exercise for people who don’t have time to write, and also for people who do. This is also an exercise for people who want to experiment with writing slowly.
Make a pact with yourself that over a long period of time—a year, five years—you will write a short story, making only a small amount of progress each day (the “every day” part is especially important).
Limitations: You may not write more than twenty words of stories on any given day.
If you write twenty words a day, in one year you can write a seven thousand word story. If you write five words a day, in five years you can write a nine thousand word story.
Decide how long you want your story to take and how long you want to work on it, and adjust the words per day (e.g. a snail’s pace).
Nothing happened
It’s an exercise in sneaking around and exploring the nature of narrative events. You need a current—or, not current, it’s not that important—newspaper or magazine. Print is best. You will look for something that seems insignificant in it.
Check the article where something happened. Choose details related to the action or activity that intersect with whatever is important in the prose. NB: this won’t be easy.
For example, I read page A11 of New York Times on Friday, January 5, 2024, and saw sentences like “Ms. Cox bought her son a version of a Nintendo console called a RetroN, which uses the same hardware as the original Nintendo console, from a pawn shop, as well as an old cathode ray tube television to help him get started” and “I’m looking at a couple perched on the roof of a park bathroom and a couple in a tree fort right now.”
Look for moments of silence in the description, moments directed away from the underlined events, and unarticulated perspectives and subjectivities. Who was present at these moments? What do they know? What don’t they know? What do they think will happen in the future? What would they say if asked to describe the past? How does their story differ from the story offered to readers?
Write something based on what you find.
Three Exercises to Improve Misunderstanding
These impulses may provoke reflection on the ways in which meaning stalls or, paradoxically, continues despite being unintelligible. Of course, they can give you some clues regarding the characters, as well as the possible location of your readers.
Another thing to consider: the relationship of misunderstanding to survival.
Here are the three exercises:
1. Write a scene in which an event is kept secret from the reader.
2. Write a dialogue between two characters, one of whom cannot hear what the other character is saying.
3. Create characters who see things that others don’t. This thing should be very big or very small.
three six five: hint, action, prophecy (endless writing summary) will be published by Siglio in May.
Lucy Ives is a novelist and critic. His latest book is Life Is Everywhere: A Novel And The Image of My Name Entering America: Essayswinner of the 2024 Vermont Book Award in Creative Nonfiction.
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Gaming center adalah sebuah tempat atau fasilitas yang menyediakan berbagai perangkat dan layanan untuk bermain video game, baik di PC, konsol, maupun mesin arcade. Gaming center ini bisa dikunjungi oleh siapa saja yang ingin bermain game secara individu atau bersama teman-teman. Beberapa gaming center juga sering digunakan sebagai lokasi turnamen game atau esports.
