The best writing comes not when you want to say something, but when you want to find something. ~Andre Dubus III
The best writing comes not when you want to say something, but when you want to find something. ~Andre Dubus III
Welcome to Week Four of Strange Containers: Flash, Hermits & Other Oddities, our 4-Week Intensive For The Kind of Writing You Might Never Do Otherwise!
Recent & Upcoming at WITD
🎆 FLASH SALE! Grab a 15% back-to-school discount on annual subscriptions just in time for our fall seasonal intensive: The Letter Re-Imagined.
📝 Writing in the Dark: THE SCHOOL closes registration soon. SCHOOL is our new 9-month slow-writing program for people serious about advancing their craft and joyful about "doing language better.” Starts September 19. ALL LEVELS.
🗓️ End-of-Summer Write-In for paid members and a celebratory WITD Salon with flash readings coming soon—watch this space for dates!
Our last day of Strange Containers! I don’t want it to end.
Especially after Monday’s amazing, healing, uplifting, inspiring, intensely honest and permission-giving conversation about creative friction, why we need it, and the extraordinary benefits of stretching beyond our limits and failing to meet our own expectations.
If you missed that convo, you can catch up here:
This one illuminating exchange, in and of itself, made this entire Strange Containers experience exponentially more valuable for us all.
And regarding the sadness of ending, don’t worry, we’ll soon be announcing our next intensive—Letters, Lists & Other Leaps of Imagination. This is another fast, fun four-week mini intensive where we’ll explore the elasticity and magic of the modern epistolary form. We’ll start in September so if you aren’t a paid member, upgrade to participate and come away with several new works in progress. Now is a great time, because WITD is having a back-to-school sale on annual subscriptions for new members!
And if you’re already a member, you might like to give a gift subscription to a writer you love or donate a subscription (all donations go toward comping subscriptions to those who need it).
Meanwhile, since it’s hard to say goodbye to these intensives, I’m including not one, but two challenging, possibly fun, and—most important of all—interesting exercises today. As always, you can try one, both, or neither, according to your inclination and schedule.
Remember, too: you can use these exercises to start brand new work (yay for new work!), and/or to jostle something more inventive out of yourself, and/or to revise something you already wrote during Strange Containers (or elsewhere!).
The latter option—rewriting a story into a wholly new form—can be maddeningly fun and might be the most revelatory act of all: to pour a story from one container into another and see which one best lights it up!
I hope some of you try it—but whatever you do, I’m excited to see it in the comments.
Today’s two exercises focus on 1) time—how we perceive it and how we work