Lists and Writing

I’m an inveterate list maker, even more so as I get older. I keep a master list of things to do, then daily lists of what I think I can accomplish. It helps me stay organized and I’m addicted, in my way, to accomplishment, to checking things off the list. So when during his workshop Kim Stafford asked us to consider lists as poetry, I was eager to try. Our first assignment (and my response) was this one:

Things I Learned Last Week

Tungsten is used for the nose cone on rockets.
Chi can be spelled qi.
Lamb shanks in red curry are delicious.
There should be a Hall of Fame for stupendously ineffective meetings.

Faucets screw off left, not right.
A 2.5-quart crock pot is not big enough for my life.
Maroon and grey brown are not at their best together.
You can’t make other people change, even when they say they want to.

What strikes me as particularly lovely about a list like this is that it is also a record of the stories of my week. The tungsten fact comes from a long work project in which I wrote up summaries about mining in Canada for a client who helps Chinese investors. I’ve also recently learned the card game Quiddler, and the writers who write together on Fridays (and play Quiddler at lunch) are all keen to find two-letter words.

I ate the lamb shanks at a Thai restaurant in NW Portland with my sister, and we had a long conversation about what to do when you’re through learning at your current job. I attended a stupefying meeting with a client who gave 8 minutes of useful information in 4 hours of sitting together.

I wrecked my kitchen faucet by tightening it instead of loosening it. I felt stupid but I also got to see Don, the handyman for our complex, an invariably cheerful man who always takes time to pet my cats. And last winter when I put the new wonderful grey-brown rug in my bedroom, which looks sensational with my chocolate brown-and-gold vintage wallpaper, my much loved maroon and lime green velvet comforter looked awful. So I gave it to my good friend Isabelle and it just works great in her bedroom.

Of course, each line in the poem could become its own poem as well as its own story, each fact of our lives another prompt.

Working with prompts to begin (or enhance) your fiction

When I was getting started as a writer, I came upon The Writer’s Book of Day by Judy Reeves. Besides being full of encouraging and helpful ideas, Reeves includes hundreds of prompt ideas, words and phrases to spark us to write. I decided to take on writing prompts as a daily practice and for the next 20 months, I wrote nearly every day. Even though a lot of the writing was marginal and some of it was downright awful, it made a huge difference in my writing: it loosened me up and helped me be more creative. I recommend it. Here are some ideas for using prompts.

1. Develop a daily practice. Set aside a brief writing time every day. Make it small (10 minutes was ideal for me) so that even if you forget until late in the day, you can still make time for it.
2. Use a timer. Write for your allotted minutes and stop, even mid-sentence, when the timer goes off. You can always continue with the story at another time.
3. Use prompts provided by a book, like the one by Judy Reeves, or a dictionary or phrases you hear in passing, or create your own. After I used up all of Reeves many ideas, I write a month’s worth of prompts on the first of each month. I did an alphabetical list of words that intrigued me. I did a list of objects in my apartment. I did phrases from poems by Mary Oliver. Anything will serve.
4. In the first sentence of each writing, use the prompt and the name of a fictional character. For example, using the prompt red tea cup, I might write this sentence: “Evelyn sat on the terrace, the red tea cup in her lap.” Then write a scene or brief story. Some months I used the same name for every prompt, beginning to develop a relationship with that character.
5. I wrote the prompts by hand in Clairefontaine notebooks (I love that paper!). I found it easier to get fictional somehow when I wasn’t at the computer, where I work all day as an editor. However, you do it, keep the writings. You never know what might come of it.