Ordinary Magic for The Turning of the Wheel
From the Archives | 5 Highly Unusual Writing Exercises & 1 Everyday Incantation.
Who wants to write not just more, but also better?
That’s what this post is for—it contains a set of five structured writing exercises and one daily incantation (another sort of practice) that can, taken cumulatively, transform your writing over time. It is magic, truly—the kind of magic we make for ourselves.
All of these exercises involve several of the skills and devices I’ve written about before, including in Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things, Attention, More Attention, and Shimmers & Shards.
You can always find all these and more by browsing the Curriculum Index
put together in January:The thing is, I believe in writing exercises the same way I believe in ordinary magic: as an ongoing practice that enhances my ability to pay attention to the world. This is a practice which, like any other, takes a lifetime to learn. We never “arrive,” we just get closer and sturdier and, hopefully, a little more attuned to how it feels when the channel between us, the world, and our words is cracked open, then more open, then wider still, until we and the world are one. We can have this recognition, like Jim Carrey did:
I saw that I am bigger than what I do, bigger than my body. I am everything and everyone. I am no longer a fragment of the universe. I am the universe.
As we practice, we learn to recognize that feeling, and fall all the way into it. And in that state openness—that’s when we are really, truly “doing language.”
It’s also when we’re most likely to create writing that is alive, writing that wakes readers up and makes them feel something. Writing that might, like all the writing I love best, have the power to simultaneously devastate us while also making us wild with hope.
I think that kind of writing happens at the precise intersection of the what and the how of language (i.e., the content and the craft).
Of course, we know beautiful writing is made by placing words one after the other in a specific order for a specific reason. And yes, marvelous accidents do sometimes result in words tumbling randomly onto the page in spontaneously perfect arrangements. But I don’t expect or feel entitled to that kind of accident. Instead, I see writing as a skill to be practiced, a magic to be cultivated.
That’s why I am always seeking to understand and reveal the how to myself when I practice and when I teach. I’ve found that the best and most productive methods of understanding and revealing the how of extraordinary writing tend to involve pairing the close reading (here’s my recent take on close reading with clear examples) of especially stunning published work with structured writing exercises.
That, then, is what I have provided you here: five structured writing exercises, along with the readings that inspired them:
“You Begin” by Margaret Atwood
“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver
“The Carrying” by Ada Limon
an excerpt from “The Love of My Life,” by
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
Other writers whose work I turn to repeatedly for inspiration include Ocean Vuong, Toni Morrison, Keise Laymon, Justin Torres, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Dorianne Laux, Saeed Jones, Joy Harjo, Wendell Berry, Carolyn Forche, Maggie Smith, Ross Gay, Lidia Yuknavitch, Diane Seuss, and the Janes (Hirshfield, Hamilton, and Smiley!). Plus many, many, many more. Too many to list, but not too many to bring to you, one by one, over the course of the coming days, weeks, and months, and years of Writing in the Dark together.
Also, I offer in this post a daily writing incantation (a writing practice yes, but it’s more than that). This one is meant, just as it says, to be done daily, ideally in the morning, for just five minutes, while the structured exercises are spelled out in order, one through five, because the skills are somewhat scaffolded, but you may also do them in whatever order you wish and at whatever pace works for you.
Please know, you can do these five exercises over and over again. They’re like buckets you fill with different words and ideas in order to see what you get. Another way to think of it: these exercises are inexhaustible hats in terms of the number of rabbits you might pull out. Ultimately, these exercises will show up for you for as long as you show up for them. They will keep revealing new aspects of the how of structure, surprise, voice, image, and more, as you work and rework them.
When working with these exercises, it works best to read the associated poem or excerpt several times before beginning to write. Ideally, print the poem or excerpt out so that you can underline images, analyze what is happening on the line level, etc. Befriend the reading as closely as you are able. But it’s also fine to just read the poem or excerpt once and do the exercise straightaway.
Never let perfect be the enemy of good!
We do our best with the time we have available, and that’s all we can ask of ourselves. It’s also how we keep your writing practice vital and connected to joy.
Finally, do not be afraid to copy the structure of the associated reading as closely as possible. You can always change it later (and usually you should, if you intend to really develop what you wrote as something other than as an exercise—though “just exercising” is a wonderful way to approach these assignments; we need to give ourselves more opportunity for the warm-up work of other artistic disciplines, such as musicians playing scales, painters doing sketches and color studies, and dancers doing stretches).
The main benefit of the exercises is to help experience firsthand and develop a muscle memory for precisely what these exceptionally skilled, talented, and deeply practiced writers did, and how they did it. Therefore, in each of the five numbered structured exercises, you should limit yourself to approximately the same number of words (fewer is fine, but not more) as in the the associated reading.
As I said, later, you can develop whatever you drew from the exercise into something longer, larger, or entirely different. But, for now, try to use the length constraint as another way to cleave more closely to the example and to the devices offered in these shimmering works.
This is how we tune our ears, sharpen our vision, and, literally, come to our senses. So be it, and so it is.
Daily Sensory Incantation
I believe every writer should do this exercise every day. It can gradually improve our writing perhaps more than any other practice. But in order for it to work, it must be done regularly and with precision, and consistently.
Start by setting a timer for five minutes and, for the entirety of those five minutes, record close, meticulous, external sensory observations of the outside world around you—the physical, exterior space you are in. Best to use a notebook and pen/pencil, not a computer or phone, to record the observations. Get up and move around the room or yard or field or whatever space you are in if you want to touch or smell things.
Or just sit still, if you wish.
You can do it differently on different days. But try not to stop writing until the timer goes off. Express the observations in fragments, not complete sentences (morning light on the carpet, cat hair on the chair, smell of coffee brewing, rain splattering on the window, baby crying, footsteps on the porch, jingle jangle of dog tags). Try to use all five major senses. Taste can be hard because it requires you to put something in your mouth and, in that way, can blur the boundary between internal and external. If that happens for you, skip taste. Smell is close enough.
The very most important part of this exercise is keeping the observations external, brief, and detached. Do not analyze, interpret, or make sentences.
Do not stretch into comparisons or metaphors. Be literal and external. Be strict with yourself. Read this post and the excerpted interview with the poet Marie Howe if you want to know more about why this is so important! Or read the Shimmers & Shards post from the first week of the Lyric Essay Challenge (which you may want to work your way through in 2024, if you have not already!).
Once the timer goes off, look over your fragments and find the five that are the most interesting, the most unique, the most jagged, the strangest. Imagine the paper is on fire and you can save only five fragments before it burns. Put a star by those. Now, read them out loud with the words “I am” in front of them (I am the morning light on the carpet, I am footsteps on the porch, I am rain splattering on the window, I am a baby crying).
If you are wholly in the exercise, the “I am” combinations should surprise you a little bit each time. You can also try these with “You are,” or with a combination of “I used to be,” “Now I am,” and “I am becoming.” Move them around and see what happens.
Even as this exercise slowly improves your writing, it will also reveal unexpected reflections of who you are and who you are becoming.
Exercise One: Simple, Not So Simple
Margaret Atwood’s You Begin
In this incredible poem—I love it so much—Atwood takes us through a series of close, plain-language observations of everyday things (a hand, color crayons, the moon) and makes clear, direct statements about the world in relation those things—e.g., that the world has only the colors of nine crayons. Then, she begins to undermine or subvert those bold, clear statements—e.g., that the world is fuller and more difficult to learn than she has said.
For this writing exercise, begin by describing some everyday object(s) in close, meticulous detail. Do not make a story or a metaphor yet. And don’t worry about what this piece of writing is going to be or say. Just try to describe something ordinary in a way that feels a bit strange and new, simply by choosing your concrete words carefully. If you are confused or frustrated, read the Atwood poem several more times and underline her descriptors.
Once you’ve described something(s) ordinary in a fresh, effective way that starts to interest you, try to make a larger, declaratory, but still clear and simple statement. Watch how Atwood does that as she transitions from talking about the child, the crayons, the rain, to this:
…and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.
This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn
Once you have made a simple statement or two, continue to explore/describe the everyday object(s), but now perhaps you do so more with slightly more complexity before finally returning to your previously made simple statement(s). You will end this exercise by continuing to undermine/subvert your original statement(s) to reveal something truer.
Exercise Two: Hand to World
Mary Oliver’s The Summer Day
When it comes to this iconic poem, everyone remembers the line about your one wild and precious life, but what about the grasshopper, this grasshopper, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand? Were it not for the grasshopper and the curiously close observation with which Oliver renders him, that ending would never land and we certainly wouldn’t believe her claim about knowing how to pay attention!
For this exercise, start with an extremely close, detailed, nearly scientific description of a single, identifiable, external object (could be animal or a part of a person but not a whole person). Describe it in the excruciating detail. Be meticulous, be precise, use plain language. This should feel almost technical.
Finally, when you cannot bear the close observation any longer, shift to interior observation (this means your thoughts, which, in Oliver's poem, starts with, I don't know what a prayer is. Finally, leap to a larger, grander, bigger call to action at the end (Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?). When you’re finished, revise this until at least the first sixty percent of the piece is strictly external. (If you would like to read more about Mary Oliver, the time I heard her read, and a wrinkle in time, I told that story in The Surprising Sound of Mary Oliver’s Voice).
Exercise Three: Home to Proclamation
Ada Limon’s The Carrying
Start with a close description of a place that means something to you or used to mean something to you. Probably this is a very familiar place—it should be at least familiar enough that you can describe it in very precise detail. Be concrete and physical and sensory and do NOT make it into a story.
Be sure to include something ugly if possible. It’s very important that we not shy away from what is ugly, which is why Limon includes the freeway overpass! Do not gloss over ugliness. Look at it unflinchingly.
Most importantly, stay external, external, external, and only toward the very end of your description, shift into interiority—you’re using the interior reflective voice now—and as you make this shift, be succinct so that after a line or two, you make a leap to something even bigger, some proclamation about life. In “The Carrying,” Limon does this when she says, We were all meant for something.
Exercise Four: Threshold
Cheryl Strayed’s The Love of My Life
The opening of Strayed’s famous essay, which was the genesis of her book Wild, is so breathtaking, from the first sentence—The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week—to the last: And this was like that — the end of one thing, the beginning of another: my life as a slut.
For this exercise, start with a moment—and it must be a moment that can fit neatly into a single scene, so not more than one hour in total—that represented a threshold in your (or your narrator's) life. Write that scene in close, specific detail, providing only the scantest amount of backfill necessary to help us understand the importance of the moment (in Strayed’s work, the backfill was that her mother has died a week ago, and that the bruises on her knees are from falling to the floor when she sees her mother dead, and that she is 22 years old—that’s all the backfill she gives us in a scene that’s almost 500 words long!). So, write the scene with almost no backfill, moving forward in time, one beat at a time.
At the end of the scene, find a natural process (in Strayed’s piece, the unfurling of a leaf) to compare to or exemplify the “before and after” nature of this moment you are writing about. Succinctly describe that natural process and, finally, in one clear sentence or phrase, make sure we know what this scene, or the “after,” is about (in Strayed's piece, her grief over her mother’s death, and the way it hurtled her into a life as a “slut”).
(For more threshold exercises, see I Can See A Million Miles From Here and The Moment After Which Everything Changed.)
Exercise Five: What Did I Know?
Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays
What a rare and luminous poem. I could read it a thousand more times and still learn from it. For this exercise, you will first want to consider something that happened routinely in your (or your narrator's life), probably during childhood, but not necessarily. Let it be an action that was between two or more people (in Hayden's poem, the father is building the fire for the family, even though he is doing it alone).
Make sure this action you are describing is something that was generally completed in no more than about 20 minutes. It’s okay to think of more than one possible action or activity, because sometimes our first idea doesn’t work (ha, understatement of the year), which is why I like having several options. But once you decide on an action or routine happening, you will want to describe it clearly and plainly.
Finally, at the end of your piece, you will make an observation about the meaning of the action as the narrator now understands it. This observation must reveal an understanding that differs profoundly from the way the narrator understood things at the time. In Hayden’s poem, the narrator reveals this as he says, What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
As you experiment with these exercises, share your experiences, questions, and observations in the comments. As always, I’m so excited to hear from you.
PS Come write with me in person this summer!
I will be teaching in person July 11-14 at the inaugural Understory Writers Conference in Park City, Utah.
Each of my three workshops at Understory will explore a different aspect of the intersection of fiction and memoir—that is, concrete, potent strategies memoirists can borrow from fiction to drastically enliven their work (while still telling the truth, and maybe even more truthfully).
will also be teaching there (!!) along with a rockstar line-up of others including Stuart Horwitz, Annie Tucker (conference founder), Josh Mohr, and more. I super hope to see some of you in Park City this summer!
Oh, my heart. That five minute exercise. Thank you thank you. I want to share what happened - at the end. A little poem slid out out between the images. Oh my goodness. Thank you. I am leaving it a little rough and raw - my editor's eye sees many things that "could be better" but a large part of why I'm taking your writing classes is to get another eye to open. To quiet the editor down. To let the work move through my body first and let it be what it is (which is often quite uncomfortable because it IS so embodied, leaving so much unhidden. The editor wants to go tidy all that mess up so it doesn't bother anyone. The other eye, as yet unnamed, also has a voice and wants to speak - rather desperately. So I am letting her do that.
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I am a yellow legal pad covered in scribbles made with two different pens.
You are three stacks of garbage cans. Plastic. Upside down. Three green, one black with rusted wheels. You are a stack of gray BRUTE cans, your handles threaded with broken bungie cords to secure the lids that never stay put and blow away.
We are a stack of mismatched lids, one gray, two cut of plywood sheets, and that green one, the rectangular top of a lost plastic bin.
I am a lilac tree seven feet tall, in full bloom but only up near the top.
I am also this smaller lilac tree, less tall - maybe four feet high. My lilacs, a deeper purple, bloom out wider, around the waist, at the ankles.
I am wind chimes playing dum da dum, dum da dum in the wind. I am trying to be heard above the roar of a plane, the gears of the school bus, the mini vans whirring by.
You are, no I am, a row of ugly trees lining the fence around an acre of farm land, blocking the view.
I am cars zooming by, mostly the passenger vans the orthodox all drive
We are a metal sculpture that you built when our children were babies and we lived in a city that was trying to reshape itself into an artist's colony. You are an artist colony, living in the past. We are cut from a sheet of aluminum and bent into a wheelbarrow race, my hands welded to the wheels, with a bench, added later, laid across my back. I am covered in bird poop. People stop and look at me. You stand behind me, holding my feet, a metal flag affixed to your shoulder. Beside us, a headless aluminum dog walks, welded to the bottom of the bench. I am giving him a name. I'll call him Toto because I am Dorothy, and you are the wizard of Oz. The real one. Not the man behind the curtain.
Outside, we are faux brick siding, metal shutters, peeling blue paint but inside, we are collectors. You pile up wood scraps and blinds and marble tiles. I stack bone china cups painted with roses over the sink.
I am a yellow metal sign stuck into a lawn. I am square. I am shouting, 10 MPH! at the motorists speeding by. Atop my head, there is another sign - a large yellow diamond, a bent arrow pointing at the sky.
I am a garden where a blue bowling ball sits atop a white plastic cylinder. You are a gardener who is really an architect, who thought that was a good idea. I look out from beneath the lilacs, trying to get your attention but once you placed me here, in the leaf mold and soil, you forgot I was there.
I am the sound of wood planks falling from a truck at the house next door. You designed that house but the contractor won't let you visit. He's a bully. You're a professional. You send texts and legal notices. On a wind-less afternoon, I imagine we can hear them ping his cell phone.
I am a yellow legal pad covered in blue clouds.
You are a plane roaring overhead.
I am trying to hear the birds call to one another.
You are a hammer slamming into timber next door.
Whack whack whack
as the birds call wot wot wot
and the wind chimes echo,
"Thank you. Dang you. Thank you. Dang you."
And the wind comes up and I think there may be rain and the chimes start singing 'all the love, all the love'. Or maybe they are chiming hallelujah.
It depends on the time of day. It depends on the wind pattern.
I have been doing this every morning. I love the five minute restraint. I love how really seeing the small details of things makes everything I see so interesting and vividly alive. The secondary play, where we shift the perspective from "I am" and "You are" and "This is" and "We are" turns everything into poetry. Meanings emerge from the mundane. This is like and nothing like the awareness exercises I teach in my intuition classes. This is . . . so cool.
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I am a blue paper mask, overturned on a cafe table. A balled-up sheet of yellow paper, torn from a legal pad, is riding on my back. As if it is a passenger and I am a boat. I wonder where we're going.
I am a brown wooden box on a cafe table, dispensing individual packets of artificial sweetener from the front of my chest. I do this all day long - offering and offering napkins and straws, forks and butter knife bundles.
I am Sweet and Low. I am Equal. I am Splenda.
I am Splenda. I've decided to be Splenda.
I like the way this name feels in my mouth.
I am a clear plastic photo frame. Inside of me a sheet of paper explains how to order. "Scan with phone camera" I tell everyone who sits here. I show them a box filled with black squiggles. This is table 20, I explain. I am powered by TOAST.
I am table 20, adjacent to the barista.
I am music but no one can hear me over the roar of the espresso machine.
I am a small paper bag, overstuffed with tea leaves. Sepia oozes through my skin into boiling water.
I am a single tea leaf, packed into a paper sack with other tea leaves from other flowers. I miss my flower. I was the stamen, standing tall at the center of her beautiful purple leaves. I wonder where my flower is now. I wonder what all of this was for. I wonder what happens next.
I am a tall thick glass filled with hot black tea. My cardboard jacket has slipped from the middle of my body to the bottom. When a hand lifts me, my jacket falls off. I don't want to burn anyone.
I am the sound system in a cafe. Voices sing through me all day. They are not my own voices. As they vibrate my body, I wonder if this is how it feels to be them. For two or three minutes, I am singing in one voice. Then I am singing in another. I do not have a song without them.