What This Is
What you’ll find in the dropdown menu (and in the list of links below) is a two-month, weekly program of simple, straight-forward creative exercises. Most of them are writing exercises. I’ve done them and I’m sharing what I’ve done here, to provide models and to put my money where my mouth is.
The Backstory
I assigned myself this program of exercises in the summer of 2020. A hard time for the whole world. As it happened, it was a very hard time for me, for reasons besides the Covid-19 pandemic. I had experienced a string of professional and creative set-backs over the course of the previous year and a half. And these weren’t anonymous rejections:
- I had been turned down for a couple of promotions at the school where I had worked for most of my professional life.
- I had been runner-up — after an extended interview process that spanned many weeks and that required me to fly in for an intensive, day-long campus visit — for a prestigious job I really (really) wanted.
- I had also been politely but summarily rejected by editors who had previously liked and often published my work.
My son (who was two years old then) wasn’t sleeping well, so my wife and I were chronically sleep-deprived. We were feeling anxious, overwhelmed, and like so many people that summer, we were feeling a little disconnected from everything/everyone around us, even from each other. In addition to the ever-present existential fear for, you know, my family’s health/lives, I was also worried about money, and I wasn’t sure what the future held. In many ways, then, it was a strange time to decide to undertake a project like this. I didn’t seem to have the bandwidth for it.
And yet I trusted my instincts and embarked on this creative commitment anyway. It turned out to be a life-line. Not only did it help me feel a little more connected to myself, to the people I love, and to the forces (wholesome and otherwise) that animate me, I also generated some new writing that felt (at least) honest to me, which I hadn’t been able to do in a while. It felt like I was establishing a nourishing new habit, one that allowed me to write without such a clear sense of what the writing (that is, the texts I produced) was supposed to do for me. I just allowed myself to commit to a regular routine of putting words and thoughts together. What resulted was more than some random journaling, nine short personal essay drafts, and a wholescale revision of two of them. I was also able to realize how hale and hardy my Creative Spirit can be. It doesn’t necessarily have to “want” to do what it does. It’s perfectly capable of faking it until it makes it, particularly if you don’t worry about whether or not what you produce is “good.” It will meet you more than halfway there.
The Overarching Structure
You will note that I have structured each week as if I was preparing a meal: pre-writing is labeled “Prep + Mise en Place,” focused free-writes are called “Appetizers,” the weekly prompt is the “Main Course,” and “Dessert” is a kind of palate-cleansing exercise that may or may not involve writing, to provide some closure to the week.
That extended metaphor is a conscious allusion to the idea that we are “feeding” the Creative Spirit. It’s also a conscious reference to Peter Elbow’s metaphor of “Cooking” from Writing Without Teachers. According to Elbow’s metaphor, our original ideas — and the words we use to express them — are raw. They need time to cook. In that process of cooking, they transform. Elbow believed the writing process (pre-writing, drafting, revising, polishing) fundamentally changes what (and how) we think. I believe that too.
The Weekly Breakdown
Here’s the weekly schedule, complete with my examples from the summer of 2020 — for solidarity’s sake and to give you a model for how you might approach the prompts. But don’t worry about “following the assignment” or doing them exactly the way I did them. These weekly creative prompts are offered in the spirit of invitation. Let your own Creative Spirit guide you through them, wherever and whenever works best for you.