Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. – Anne Lamott

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away. – Annie Dillard

Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life…Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.  – Henry David Thoreau

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. – Samuel Beckett

The Writing Habit

1. You must find a place and a time to write every day. Experiment with locations; search for the place(s) that will allow you to write freely and without interruption. Find a time to write that suits your work – play around with different times. Explore writing routines and approaches (notebook vs. laptop, library vs. under a tree). Take walks. Exercise your imagination. Hone your senses. I am a believer in actively embracing the world through observation and informal writing whenever possible.
2. You will need to own at least one substantial notebook (I recommend unlined to enable absolute freedom to work beyond lines and for visual and multi-media exploration), and one small pad to keep in your pocket at all times (you’ll thank me for this). Bring your notebooks to classes and conferences. These can be your most useful tools as a writer and observer of the world, and are required for this course. You must write in your notebook daily. Too many details can slip through the cracks if you don’t record them, and the process of recording cultivates your awareness of what surrounds you. The effort and fun you have in these pages will provide some of the most significant opportunities to try out writing and to find your way to the kind of writing you want to pursue. It is not a diary or a journal in the-“This is what I did” tradition; look at it as the writer’s version of the visual artist’s sketchbook. The best writing always comes from fooling around, from playing with abandon on paper. Jot down snippets of conversations, thoughts, descriptions, words you like the sounds of, questions, quotes from the readings, anything that might be useful to you in your writing, even if you’re not sure how or why. Write in fragments or sprawls, horizontally or vertically – it doesn’t matter. Draw, collage, paste, whatever you want. Do anything and use anything to get you going; whatever you’ve always wanted to try out and never dared to or had the time to before now. This is a chance for you to discover your particular relationship with language, your playing field. Be bold, inventive, loose. I will often assign brief specific entries to jumpstart certain play within each genre. Do not limit yourself to these assignments. You must do them, but you must also go to your notebook for yourself. This notebook is also the place for you to track your development as a writer. Consider your process, your growth and struggles and moments of breakthrough, etc. – by the end of the quarter you will have an account of your journey throughout this course.

Daily Possibilities:

• Automatic Writing a la Gertrude Stein. Start with one minute a day, work up to ten or more by mid-quarter.  Get out your notebook, and say, “Go.” And then write without stopping, thinking, editing.  Write in lines or sprawls or fragments or real sentences – it doesn’t matter. Just go until the time limit is up. No excuses. See what comes out. From time to time read these bits and find out if anything is stirring.
• Idea and image jottings. Keep a section for anything that pops up: overheard conversations, a striking image, a thought, an observation of someone’s actions – anything that could possibly be material for your writing someday.
• Snippets. of things you admire from what you’ve read. Jot down a line from a poet, a paragraph from an essay or story, a few words from a peer’s latest story, something you read online – let these stay with you by writing them down (and write down the source, too – you might need it someday).
• Memory writing. Write write write about all you’ve done, known, felt, and thought – make it as sensory as possible. Record places, people, events, conversations, etc. Then write about everything you haven’t done but imagined doing. And then write about stuff you haven’t a clue about. (Take just a few minutes a day.)
• Formal Exercises. Sometimes giving yourself specific demands can be helpful, especially if you’re stuck. See me for ideas.
• Anything at all. Drawings, collages, photos. Stuff you find in the world. Anything to get you going. Anything that you’ve always wanted to try out and never dared to or had the time to before now.

Nonfiction Notebook Ideas

• List 5 memories that were life-shaping for you; describe 1 in detail within a 10-minute story.
• List 10 places that are important to you; describe 1 of these places in detail.
• Go to a physical place; spend 10 minutes writing an evocative description; later that night read what you’ve written and write 1 sentence stating the meaning you hope to convey of this place.
• Go to a place in a photograph or in your memory spend 10 minutes writing an evocative description; later that night read what you’ve written and write 1 sentence stating the meaning you hope to convey of this place.
• Go find an unusual spot at an unusual time and sit there for a while; later, write about what it felt like to be there.
• Look out the window from wherever you write and describe a single object outside in detail in a way that reflects your mood at that particular moment, let the description evoke the mood (show don’t tell).
• Write down the names of 5 places you’ve traveled to (as far as overseas, as close as some local town); then, write a brief collage description of each capturing the senses (smell, taste, sight, sound, touch) of each place portrait; consider the experience of moving through these places as a traveler/observer in interaction with the culture, lifestyle, or community of a place; write down any words or phrases that come to mind (1 piece may be turned into a fuller piece for an assignment).
• Extend 1 of your travel collages, and change the voice to 2^nd person p-o-v.
• Find a photograph of someone you know and write the story of that image.
• Describe the physical appearance of someone you know, characterizing that person only through description; then interview that person, removing yourself entirely and letting him/her speak as the only present voice.
• Stranger Study #1: people watch, taking notes on a stranger’s appearance, actions, speech, etc., then go back to your writing place and write a brief portrait. Do this exercise every day observing a different stranger, accumulating 5 total. (You will use one of these for an assignment.)
• Write about an extraordinary experience with food.
• Write about an extraordinary encounter with art.
• Write a 10-minute true story. Do this once per day, giving yourself a time limit.

Fiction Notebook Ideas

• Take any clip from your nonfiction notebook entries and make it somehow fantastical, exaggerated, unrealistic (ie. fictional).
• Describe a place as seen through the perspective of an object in that setting, making the object come to life (give it a voice and perspective).
• Select a place that appeared in the nonfiction unit for you, and tell a 10-minute fictional story as it occurs within that place.
• Take a photo (yours, or a random found photo) and create a fictional story about the scene or image within it.
• Take a description of someone you know, changing 1 fundamental characteristic.
• Have a character narrate a true story in their 1^st person p-o-v. (10-min)
• Transpose this story into 3^rd person p-o-v. (10-min)
• Write a physical description of a made-up character as different from you as imaginable (keep this character human).
• Write a 10-minute story, 1^st person; 2^nd person; 3^rd
• Write a brief dramatic monologue.
• Write a 1-page scene with dialogue; Rewrite the same scene without dialogue.
• Write a 10-minute story using a snippet of an overheard conversation and casting it into a larger scene of your own.
• Experiment with characters for your story, or for future material, writing 1-2 sentences for each character to bring them to life using different methods of characterization.
• Write a 10-minute story told from the end to the beginning.
• Write a 10-minute story told in collage, out of time and conventional structure.
• Write a 1-sentence story.
• Write a 1-paragraph story.
• Write a story in sections or fragments.

Poetry Notebook Ideas

• Write 1-page continuous each day; do not stop, do not read what you’ve written. Then, return later for images and bits worth keeping. Write these on paper, looking for connections. (Note: to jumpstart you can pick a subject – salt, water, sea, red, hands, metal, road, etc. – and incorporate that same subject into your writing each day).
• Write words you like the sound of, images you’re collecting for poems, bits of dialogue you overhear, descriptions of people, places, things.
• Write for 10-minutes continuously of automatic writing, then go back and circle/extract the good stuff.
• Snapshots: Write a page of prose snapshots of people & places important to you, using concrete, specific, pointed details; Experiment by turning these snapshots into verse, listening closely to rhythms to find line-breaks; Select 1 of these and turn it into a poem, rearranging and changing words as necessary, expanding and editing until you’ve found the best shape for your poem.