A full index of WITD, and a new video post that shows you how to use it!
Can’t Find What You’re Looking For? Click Here For A Video Tutorial To Help!
Meanwhile, here on this Index you can find links to the WITD curriculum (challenges, prompts, & memos) categorized by specific intensives, post type, genre, mood, and season so you can come back to them again and again.
And if you want to be inspired first, check out our big, beautiful, very incomplete and fast-growing directory works published in journals and magazines from NYT to Brevity to Fourth Genre and many more by writers who began their writing process in a WITD workshop or with a Writing in the Dark exercise or supported by a WITD method.
Born in WITD: A Big, Beautiful Directory of Published Work
Like life, the directory AND this Curriculum Index are incomplete and works in progress! We will be updated (semi)-regularly by Billie Oh—you can also share suggested updates to this index in the comments.
Five Foundational Exercises Including One for Paying Attention
Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things
Absolute Attention is Prayer
Exercise for Attention
Shimmers & Shards: A Practice of Paying Attention to Concrete Details
What Close Reading Really Is: A Practice of Attention
What I Mean By “Aboutness”
A Surprising Tool For Finding Your Story’s Aboutness
How to Actually Become A Better Writer (& the problem with “workshops”)
Essay in Twelve Steps 2.0
Toward Pleasure
For the Joy & the Sorrow
The Art of the Scene
The Letter Reimagined
Strange Containers
Visceral Self
Story Challenge 2.0
Story Challenge
Essay in 12 Steps
30-Day Creativity Challenge
Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things
How I Grew My Substack from Zero to 40K Annual Income in Just 12 Months
How I Grew My Substack from (Almost) Zero to 40K Annual Income in Just 12 Months (Pt 2)
More Most Popular Posts
Lit Salon
Essays
Writing Exercises/Prompts
Voice Memos
Threads
Poetry
CNF
Fiction
Creativity
Body-Based Writing
Get Happy
Get Grounded
Get Grateful
Get Devastated (in a good way)
Get Brave
Get Unstuck
Beginnings
Middles
Endings
Revision
Spring
Summer
Fall
Winter
What An Editor Really Wants
Be Brave & Write Beautifully
First, I Made A Wish
Since My Dad Died
Why I Teach in Prisons
Dear Grotesque
Dear Rejected
9 Questions & 26 Craft Keys
Dear Especially
For Most of My Life, I Wrote Alone
Dear Curious But Confused
The Paradoxical Power of The Literal
The Core of Beauty
Write Like A Child Running
Rene Denfeld
Replay! Live Salon
So Damn Scary
Through The Hurt
What is Embodied Writing, Anyway?
Hungering
Bent: Daughterhood Recalled Through Skin and Bone
The Desire-Pleasure Paradox
A Darkness So Present
I Remember Where I Am From
Desire Determines Who You Become
All Creatures Know Love
How To Be A Writer
Four Dogs, Maybe Five
I Was a Child in a Child's Body
Hopelessly Entangled in Stars
Capturing an Untamed Thing
I Want Your Wingless Body
Sleeping Birds Are Vulnerable
Look Out Over Open Water
Some Might Have Called The Roses Garish
My Skittish Puppy
Writing the Wounds Closed
Write Into Darkness
Even Now
The Feeling of (Highly Specific) Things
Wants, Met and Unmet
I Can See A Million Miles From Here
Choose Your Own Adventure
Wants, Met and Unmet
Source Waters
Marvelous, Could I Do It?
This Ruse You Call Necessity
They Fight & They Sing
Never Too Late, Always Enough
A Simple Story
Meditation Guide
Embodied Meditation Guide
I Don't Intend To Get Out Without A Broken Heart
Life is Short, But Desire, Desire is Long
Saying Grace, David Sedaris & Fudge-Colored Towels
The Transformative Power of Finishing
The Art of the Confession
Writing Through Dark Times
Camp Dreams
Can We Listen Across Species?
How do you feel about your mother?
The Last Time You Sang to Yourself
Childhood Days
Body/Self
What Makes You YOU?
Useless Days
Life a Daring Adventure or Nothing at All
Writing Truer Truths
Naming Our Dream
What Makes You Feel A Writer?
Share Something You're Happy About!
My Body My House
I Remember
Dear Poetry & Death
Mary Oliver's Voice
This Ruse You Call Necessity
Your Heart's Subtle Voice
Scars
What An Editor Really Wants
The Day I Stop Wanting
I Want You To Write About Sex
My Story + The World’s Words
Raptor With A Broken Wing
The Paper Route
The Day I Stop Wanting
Beginnings
Writing Fiction Should Be Scary
Editors Want "Voice" Characters That Sing
Desire, A Three-Way Exercise
Place
Image
Every Character Should Want
No Common Wharf
Two Truths and a Lie
Blind Contour
Freeing The Dizzying Energy of the Unconscious
The Secret Power of “Not Yet”
Ugly Beautiful
Art of Erasure
It's All About Attention
The Beauty of Boring
Out Of The Spotlight
Mastering The Art Of (Self) Conversation
A Literary Question & Answer Game
The Desire-Pleasure Paradox
Welcome to the World
Root
Sacral
Solar Plexus
Heart
Returning Home
Chakra Series
To Inhabit Someone Else’s Body
Sleeping Birds
Listening
Sensory Rich Paths
Your Solid Bones
Open Water
Music Moves Us
Into & Through
The Essence of Who We Are
Happy is Boring
Ode
Share Something
Not Enough
Laughter
The More Delight There Was
Release
Absolute Attention is Prayer
Root
Even Now
Ordinary Magic
The Secret Power of “Not Yet”
Shape the World
Never Late, Always Enough
To Have All Give All
Study Delight
Warm Glow
Hopelessly Entangled
Begin
God I Am Tender
Replay!
Injured Beavers
Too Raw
Dear Especially
Brutal Beauty
Dear Grotesque
What Makes You Feel Useful, Alive & Strong?
So Damn Scary
The Very Bad Writing Workshop
The End of the World
The Transformative Power of Finishing
Lizard Brain
Radical Failure
Writing = Living: Here's Why
To Want, To Dream, To Create
How Thrilling It Is
Dear Stuck
Lying Our Way to Truer Truths
The Only Technique That Helped Me Write About Trauma
Alive With Metaphor
Dear Nothing New
The Visceral Self
Immersive Mediation Guide
All Flesh is Proud
The Starlit Power of Wanting
We Can Be Both
The Lanterns We Clutch
Even When It's Hard
Welcome to the World
Start Where You Are
We Are Made of Starstuff
Even Now
What Is a Story?
The Gate
The Art of Listing
Source Waters
You Don't Necessarily Sense the Motion
Ordinary Magic
In The Middle, Our Minds Play Tricks
The Turn
I Would Break Into Blossom
Choose Your Own Adventure
How to Finally Finish A Thing
Finally On My Way To Yes
The Transformative Power of Finishing
Thousands of Incremental Adjustments
The Importance of "Teeth"
Aboutness
30-Day Creativity Challenge
The Greening
Is That Fucked Up?
A Simple Recipe
Walking Backward
Shadow
How to Speed
We Can Keep Creating
Sing Three Short Songs
The Bruising And The Mending
Decomposing
Fire
September
So Many Roads
Ordinary Magic
The Art of The Image
That Time I Helped Steal a Car
Unknowing the Known World
I Want Your Wingless Body
Sleeping Birds
I love this (so helpful!) - it speaks to my deep love of making lists and lists of lists to rein in the world.
Wow! Someone went through a lot of work to save me time. Thank you @Jeannine Ouellette and @Billie Oh!