And I get to play a little. If you’ve followed me for a while, I think you know I like to play.

On another note: I will reschedule our cancelled Zoom for paid subscribers as soon as I can, but I’m working every day, including weekends, for the time being, which has drastically cut into my writing time. So stay tuned on that.

Thanks for being here.

Writing Exercises You Can Do Without Writing

Careful Observation

Careful observation is the best tool a writer has, and one we can practice anywhere. When I wake in the morning I remind myself to pay attention. The same when I find myself zoned out on the interstate, or mindlessly scrolling social media. Paying attention to the world as we move through it reminds us that we are moving through the world. It’s the deliberate decision to stop the world from scrolling by, and stop ourselves from doomscrolling through it.

Writing is also a deliberate stopping. Wordsworth called writing “emotion recollected in tranquility.” But one is not able to recall in tranquility unless one is paying attention. Pay attention to the earthworms on the sidewalk after the rain, what shapes and sentences they might make. Pay attention to the weather, and how it affects our insides, our own stormy seas. Pay attention to the light and to the darkness. To the earth and the sky, to your own internal rhythms, to the rhythms of sentences like the ones you want to spill out into the world.

Pay attention.

Writing-Related Work

Some days I’m not excited about working on anything in particular so I’ll do some writing-related work instead. Most days it is editing. I write a lot of fast first drafts and then go back and edit them later, so this works well for days I want to get some work done but don’t have as much time or energy to write a new piece. (It’s also a good idea to let a piece sit for a while after writing, then edit at a later date.)

Other days I do research. I don’t submit to literary journals as often as I used to, but some days I set aside for submissions, which involves research to determine which journals are open for submissions and their guidelines. I email my agent, I answer emails about my work, I research and send out opportunity or promotional emails.

Some days I simply read through old work. On these days I’m looking for an overlooked gem, maybe an older piece to reprint on Substack. I’m revisiting things I have written, work I’ve done. I look back on old work like visiting old friends, and use that energy like a vacation to recharge and rejuvenate.

Mostly I’m reminding myself to sit at the desk, and do the work.

Titles

Keep a mind out for titles as you move through your day. Train your ear to hear snippets of conversations, phrases you can later recall. Cool quotes, good first lines, good last lines of stories or essays you’ve read. I used to grab the nearest anthology and just read the titles, trying to understand the rhythm and language of naming something. Of calling your work this thing that defines it for everyone but also is supposed to draw them in, to be somewhat familiar but also new.

No wonder titles are so hard to come up with. Which is why you should always be looking for them, and listening. You never know when one will jump out at you.

List of My Favorite Titles That I Have Come Up With:

The Wild Thing With People Feet Was My Favorite

The Night They Hung Ricky Steamboat

One Boot, No Pants

This One Will Hurt You

The Sadness Scale, As Measured by Stars and Whales

I wrote “The Wild Thing With People Feet” and “The Night They Hung Ricky Steamboat” after coming up with the title first. Both times I was at the bar, telling a friend a story, and the title + idea fell into my beer-soaked lap. I don’t recommend going to bars now, but I do recommend having a good friend you can swap stories with.

Lists

Like this one, and the one above. You add to it over a few days or a few weeks. You keep the list in the back of your mind and jot down notes on your phone or in your notebook. Then when you get a little writing time, you fill the lists in. You add the annotation, you play a little with list-y type things.

For instance: I’ve had this file open on my computer for two weeks, adding to it here and there. I’ve also come up with several lists in the process of creating my own list, and I give them to you, now, for free. You may steal these for your own work.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s Favorite Hairstyle(s)

Countries Outside America We Wish Donald Trump Would Move To

Reagan’s Shittiest Laws

Ways Trickle-Down Economics Has Fucked Us For 40 Years

Reasons You Should Never Insert Vegetables Into a Secondary Bodily Orifice

Most Vituperative Fox News Show Hosts

Most Bite-y Insects

Best Campbell’s Soup Flavors

Favorite Three’s Company Episodes

Sitting

Preferably outside. The idea is to get away from screens. To touch grass because the earth is good.

Don’t believe that nonsense about how you always have to be doing something. Screw that capitalist noise. You deserve to sit in the sun and stare at the grass if you want to. Taking in scenery is good, and sitting outside is good. It lets your mind get quiet. It settles the heart.

It reminds you aren’t a machine, that most of what you see on a screen isn’t real, that the small quiet moments give us sustenance and security, away from the world’s clamoring.

And I don’t know about you, but I can’t write when I am listening to the world’s clamoring.

People Watching

My friend Matt and I used to make up stories about the people around us, imagining their wild inner lives. It started at an Italian restaurant in a DC suburb where we were not getting a table. It was a packed place but we found a spot at the bar and ordered beers, then Matt nodded at the hostess who had led us to the bar and I told Matt she was a law student at Gorgetown but had been recruited by the CIA and worked at this restaurant to gather intel on the DC-area elite. It’s a game we played often in grad school, when we were constantly creating characters and trying to make them come to life.

Sometimes when I am out in public with Jenn I’ll nod toward someone and make up a story about them—how they have gold buried in the basement or a secret proclivity for deviant (but consensual!) sexual acts. What I am doing is trying to imagine the lives of other people. Their interior thoughts and feelings, their wants and desires, the flotsam and jetsam that makes them float.

I am trying to find the shared humanity in all of us, which is what writing is.

Walking

There are 40 million books out there about the benefits of walking, and I would also bet 40 million book have been conceptualized while the writer was talking a walk.

What a walk does is give the body something to do while the mind takes in information. But I don’t need to explain this. If you’re reading this you’re a writer, and if you’re a writer who takes long walks you already know what walking does to your brain.

You also know the real danger is forgetting the idea your walk generated before you get back home to jot it down.

Showering

This is the same thing as walking, really—you engage in an activity in which you can perform on autopilot. The brain doesn’t need much power to perform this function, leaving it a lot of room to run around in and think up weird stuff, which is why you get good writing ideas in the shower.

What this shows us—walking or showering—is that the mind loves making up stories. It loves to play games and solve problems when it doesn’t have a lot of pressure on it.

Generating ideas while walking or showering is low pressure. It also shows you can leave your brain running in the background and it will do work while you clean your naughty bits.

Reading

In grad school I took two classes—Structure of Fiction and Structure of Nonfiction—that changed my writing through reading. In those classes we looked at fiction or nonfiction as writers, not literature majors. We weren’t looking for themes or symbols. We were studying structure—language and rhythm and syntax. Sentences and how narrative elements come together as story. Why writers put words together the way they do.

And we read. We read so much it is still, to this day, hard for me to read for pleasure. I have to turn my inside stuctural editor off, otherwise I am noticing turns of phrase and defamiliarizing words. I am thinking about sentence structure and voice. About rhythm, how you can feel in the sentences when the writer is gearing up to say something important. You can feel, in a short story or an essay, that the end is coming if the writer has the right rhythm, the right road signs along the way to tell you, the reader, that here comes the ending.

Those rhythms get inside you when you read a lot. You begin to learn when to slow down your sentences, and when to speed them up. When to bring the reader in close, and when to connect them to the fiery cosmos of our shared humanity standing under the warbling stars.

None of These Replace Writing

You still have to do the work. You have to put the sweat in, put the time in, sit at the desk, pay your dues, my dudes. There is no other way.

Open Yourself Up to Both the Horror and Beauty of the World

The yin and yang. Good and evil. The duality of man. That Jungian thing. Open yourself up to both have and had. To love and loss, to richer and poorer, to both the horror and beauty of the ugly, magical world. Look in the dark corners for stars through the broken roofs. For light in the darkness. For kindness amid all the hatred, for a tiny green plant growing among the stones in the hard gardens we keep.

Open yourself.

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Tip Jar

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