on cultivating your own inspiration

When I'm writing and feel stuck and/or uncreative, I like to make up little challenges for myself. (Alright, I just heard that thought in my head as I was typing it and thought, "whoa. I'm a loser.") But seriously. It's fun (for English people like me) to come up with writing prompts/games just for something new to do. So today, as I was journaling, I decided to try something different. I made up the following challenge:



1) open a book and pick one or two sentences (fairly randomly)

2) choose five words from that selection

3) write an 11-sentence prose poem using those five words in the following sequence: in sentence one, you must use the first word you picked. In sentence two, you must use the second, etc. At the 6th sentence, you must use all five words. In sentence seven, you must use the 5th word (work your way backwards). In sentence eight, you must use the fourth word, etc. That way, the piece sort of mirrors itself.


...confusing? I'll show you what I came up with tonight.


Here's the selection I used:

Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people's brains, or something about the earth's magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won't be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans." (Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time)



The words I picked were:

1) scientists

2) lightning

3) magnetic

4) rainbows

5) frying



Here's the piece I created:

In our silence, we could count all of them like scientists: the spots above our heads that fall to the ocean past our toes. Yesterday at this same time, there had been lightning going sideways across the water, but today is darker and capable of eating things up. It is only these stars and their magnetic tails that yearn to fall in elliptical swoops toward the earth. "I was thinking today about that dress you have with small rainbows around the hem," he says to me, words falling short in lazy circular patterns. My skin is hot from a daytime-frying-sun. "Yeah, I liked that dress, but one of the rainbows fell off of the bottom and I got a spot on it when I was frying fish a few weeks ago," I say, thinking of us as two scientists who could only talk about lighting, the lack of it, the lack of magnetic pull on the earth. Our thoughts are frying up in the air and evaporating, a mystery with all the breeze. Sometimes, when you are young, you want everything to be sunshine and rainbows. Tonight I am remembering being a child, when I would play with a doll who had magnetic hands and I would think of how things being pulled together made more sense than things being pulled apart. "I think that's lightning over there," he says with too much excitement, pointing across the sea. "It isn't", I respond, and again we are just scientists, experimenting with sad concoctions of silences.




...and there you go. Try it if you so desire. It could be fun :)