Things to Write About

Thirteen extended exercises for finding material in objects places archives dreams reading and chance

There is an overlook in Seattle where the Olympic Mountains emerge across the water at twilight. The color changes by the minute. People who were walking somewhere else stop and turn toward it, then stand beside one another without speaking. It feels like a poem before anyone writes it. I have stood there more than once and thought I should make something from the scene. I still have not. The unwritten version keeps accumulating: the angle of the street, the strangers pausing, the mild embarrassment of being moved by a view everyone has already photographed.

Most lists of things to write about assume that the subject is missing. They offer a hundred quick ideas and leave you alone with the same blank page. When I cannot write, I usually have plenty of possible subjects. I have not stayed with one long enough for it to become particular. A mountain is still a mountain. A receipt is still a receipt. A dream remains a strange anecdote I will forget by lunch. Attention gives these things pressure, history, and relation. That takes more than a passing thought.

The writing prompts below ask for anywhere from forty-five minutes to a week. Some begin in a book or an archive. Others begin with a sound, an object, a place, an instruction, or a private ritual. Keep the notes before you know what form they will take. A poem may come out of a map, an essay may need photographs, and a story may begin inside a museum label. The first task is to gather enough material that the finished work can surprise you.

Further reading and artistic lineages

Things to write about when you cannot choose a subject

Choose one boundary for the day and let it narrow the field. You are giving your attention somewhere to land.

Stay until the place changes

Set aside at least forty-five minutes and sit in one public place where you can remain without getting in anyone’s way. A bus stop, library lobby, laundromat, overlook, waiting room, or cafe will do. Divide a page into short intervals and write down what passes through each one. Record arrivals and departures, repeated gestures, scraps of language, changes in light, machines switching on, and the odd moments when apparently nothing happens. Return to the same spot at another hour, or on another day, and make a second record. Georges Perec spent days observing Place Saint-Sulpice for An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Your place can be smaller and less famous. Familiarity may help because it makes the overlooked details easier to notice.

Afterward, sort the notes into what remained, what changed, and what you expected but never saw. Write a piece in which the place carries the action. Let human figures enter as temporary weather instead of treating every stranger as a character you need to explain. Include at least one repetition exactly as it occurred. Include one absence, such as the bus that never arrived or the mountain hidden by cloud. If the first draft turns picturesque, return to the least attractive detail and stay there for a page. That stubborn detail often contains the actual subject.

Make a sound map

Spend twenty minutes listening from a fixed position. Put a small mark for yourself in the middle of a blank sheet, then place each sound according to its direction and apparent distance. Give the sounds shapes rather than names when you can: a thin diagonal for tires on wet pavement, a cluster of dots for dishes behind a wall, a long wavering line for an airplane. Note which sounds cover others and which arrive only after you have been quiet for several minutes. You may make a recording for reference, though the drawing should come from your own attention. Pauline Oliveros described Deep Listening as a conscious practice distinct from involuntary hearing. The map helps reveal how selective your ordinary hearing has become.

Use the map as a score for a piece of writing. Move from the nearest sound to the farthest, then reverse the route. Allow one sound to recur each time the piece changes direction. Describe a sound you cannot identify without solving it, and write down a silence that has shape because something expected is missing. A short lyric may emerge, though this method can also produce a scene, an audio essay, or a walk with spoken instructions. If you record the final text, play it back in the original place and notice which sounds answer it. Janet Cardiff’s audio walks are useful companions here because recorded narrative and present surroundings keep interfering with one another.

Things to write about through objects and place

Objects carry the marks of materials, labor, travel, use, and abandonment. Place adds another layer. The exercises in this section treat physical evidence as a way into writing, even when the final piece contains no image of the original object.

Build a small museum from one week

For seven days, collect one small discarded thing each day. Take only what is safe, legal, and clearly abandoned. Leave natural features, personal documents, culturally sensitive material, and anything whose removal would disturb a place. A bottle cap, torn label, loose thread, fragment of packaging, or anonymous hardware can be enough. Photograph each object where you found it before moving it. At home, give it an accession number and record the date, location, material, condition, and the detail that made you bend down. Keep your interpretation separate from what you can verify.

At the end of the week, arrange the seven objects until relations appear among them. Write two labels for each. The first should be strictly factual and the second openly speculative. Then write a catalog essay for the collection as if the objects entered the same room for a reason. You may photograph the arrangement, bind the labels into a small book, or turn the essay into a prose poem. Joseph Cornell’s boxes show how objects can acquire force through arrangement, while Cecilia Vicuña’s precarios bring cast-off materials into temporary and fragile relation. Let scale remain small. A museum can fit on a desk and still require a serious theory of what belongs together.

Follow one ordinary object backward

Choose something you touch often and know almost nothing about: a spoon, pencil, key, tea bag, charging cable, envelope, or brick. Begin with close description. Measure it, draw it, list its materials, and note every sign of wear. Then spend two or three hours following it backward. Where might the material have come from? Who designed this version? What machines and hands shaped it? How did it travel to you? Find at least three credible sources, including one that complicates the easy story. A manufacturer’s history, patent, shipping route, labor report, or local record can move the object out of the private room and into a much larger system.

Write the object’s biography as a chain of custody. Mark each statement in your notes as verified, inferred, remembered, or invented so the finished piece can make honest choices about uncertainty. Pay attention to the place where the record disappears. That gap may reveal whose work went unnamed or which cost stayed outside the sales copy. You can keep the categories visible in a documentary essay, or use the research underneath a fictional monologue. Either way, let the object’s physical marks resist the story you hoped to tell. A bent tine or frayed cord may be more exact than your first thesis.

Let weather finish the work

Make a temporary arrangement outdoors from materials already present in the immediate area, such as fallen twigs, loose petals, stones, or water. Work somewhere your activity is permitted and avoid moving living plants, building cairns, blocking paths, or leaving string and other debris behind. Photograph or sketch the arrangement when you finish. Return after rain, wind, tide, foot traffic, or a full day of ordinary exposure. Record every change without restoring the original. If a person or animal has moved something, describe the evidence you have rather than imagining an intention.

Write the work in stages: the gathering, the arrangement, the first disturbance, and what remains. Give agency to the actual forces involved, including gravity, dampness, glare, and decay. Cecilia Vicuña originally placed some of her fragile precarios at the ocean’s edge and allowed the tide to erase them. Your finished piece can preserve the changes while accepting that the object itself was temporary. Try a sequence of dated prose blocks, photographs with captions, or a poem whose lines lose words at the same rate that the arrangement disappears. End with a precise inventory of what you removed from the site and what you left there.

Things to write about through reading and research

Reading supplies material and teaches forms of attention that a blank page cannot. Research also introduces resistance. Another person’s language, history, or system of knowledge will refuse some of your assumptions and redirect the work.

Follow the footnote until the question changes

Open a book you are already reading and choose one sentence that keeps catching on you. Copy it by hand with its page number. Follow one name, citation, footnote, or unfamiliar term out of the book. At the next source, choose another thread and continue until you have reached three sources you did not expect to read that day. Keep a research log in the order of discovery. Alongside titles and facts, note the wrong guesses, unavailable books, search phrases, mistranscriptions, and moments when a source changed the question you thought you were asking. Set a time limit of about three hours so the trail retains the shape of a particular session.

Compose the piece in that same order. Allow the reader to experience the detours instead of receiving a cleaned-up summary at the end. Quotations can appear as pieces of found language, provided you identify their sources and use only what the new work genuinely needs. Susan Howe’s archival writing offers one model for letting fragments, typography, and historical documents remain active inside a poem. You may finish with an essay about the search, a collage poem, or a facsimile of the research notebook. The work succeeds when the original sentence has become surrounded by relations you could not have planned in advance.

Read one poem outward

Choose one poem, preferably from a place, language, or tradition you know only partially. Read it aloud twice. On the first reading, follow the sound and the feeling before trying to explain them. On the second, mark an image you can see, a word you need to look up, a turn you do not understand, and a detail that seems to depend on cultural or historical context. Ask two plain questions: What does this mean? What does it mean here? If the poem is translated, compare two translations when they are available. Notice what each version gains through rhythm, diction, and relation, alongside anything that may have been lost.

Now move outward from the poem. Read about its author, translator, original language, and immediate context, then follow one reference into another book. Write a response that records the movement of your understanding. Avoid turning the poem into a code with one correct solution. Describe the moments when sound carried you before knowledge arrived and the moments when research changed what you could hear. The result might be a critical essay, a letter to the poem, or a new poem built around one image. My International Poetry Library offers routes by country and author, and my guide to understanding poetry gives a longer version of this reading practice.

Build an archive around a gap

Choose a person, building, local event, family story, or public decision that survives in incomplete records. Spend several days gathering what remains: photographs, maps, directories, newspaper notices, meeting minutes, letters, oral accounts, and the physical site as it exists now. Keep a separate list of what you cannot locate. Record contradictions without forcing them into agreement. If you interview someone, explain the project, ask permission to record or quote them, and allow them to set boundaries. An archive often reflects the priorities of the people and institutions that had the power to preserve things, so absence needs careful interpretation.

Write from the gap while keeping its outline visible. You might alternate documents with short scenes, place blank space where a record should be, or let two incompatible accounts sit beside each other. Sophie Calle often builds works through photographs, text, pursuit, and partial knowledge. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee moves among documents, languages, images, and fractured histories. Walid Raad has used invented archival forms to examine how histories of violence get constructed. These artists make different ethical and formal choices, but each shows that documentary material can remain unstable. Label invention as invention, especially when the subject involves another person’s life or a history of harm.

Dreams rituals and private symbols

Dreams and rituals produce material through repetition, sensation, and private association. They deserve patience. Give yourself several days of notes before asking the images to explain themselves.

Give a dream a grammar

For seven mornings, write down the first dream image you can recover before checking your phone or beginning the day. A complete narrative is unnecessary. Record a color, room, object, bodily sensation, weather pattern, sentence, or impossible action. Later in the day, add what the image reminds you of, while leaving the morning entry unchanged. At the end of the week, make a small index. Which objects recur? Which spaces connect unexpectedly? Which actions belong only to the dream world? Draw five symbols from the material and give each a rule based on its behavior. A door may change the speaker. Blue may remove a verb. A bird may force the next sentence into the future tense.

Write a piece that obeys this private grammar without supplying a glossary. Let the symbols behave consistently enough that the reader can feel relations without receiving a diagnosis. You can work in fragments, prose, drawing, or a sequence of images with captions. Susan Hiller collected reports of dreams and other overlooked experiences without reducing them to a single explanation, while Ithell Colquhoun used esoteric systems as generative structures for visual work. Their approaches can give permission to preserve mystery and still work rigorously. After drafting, underline every explanation of a symbol. Remove half of them and see whether the pattern grows more palpable.

Invent a ritual and keep the evidence

Choose a question you have been circling and design one safe action to repeat for five or seven days. Tie the action to a place, object, and sensory condition so it cannot happen entirely in your head. You might read the same paragraph beside an open window at dusk, walk one block while carrying a bowl of water, or hold an ordinary desk object while listening for the quietest sound in the room. Keep the action physically safe, consensual, and compatible with the place. Repeat it at roughly the same time each day. During the ritual, take brief notes on sensation, distraction, weather, memory, and any accidental interruption.

Wait until the final day before shaping the notes. CAConrad’s (Soma)tic poetry rituals offer a useful precedent for placing the body and the writing practice in deliberate relation. Your ritual can remain modest and personally meaningful. Read all the notes aloud, circle recurring phrases, and copy them into a new document in the order they occurred. Build the piece from repetition and variation. Include the day when the action felt empty, rushed, or ridiculous, since that resistance belongs to the evidence. The question may remain unresolved. What matters is that it has passed through time, place, and the body instead of staying abstract.

Instructions chance and other people

A constraint can open the work to events you did not arrange. Other people make the outcome less predictable still. Use clear consent and keep the instruction generous enough for each participant’s place and circumstances.

Send one instruction into the world

Write an instruction that fits on a small card and can be completed in ten minutes. It should direct attention without demanding a particular interpretation. For example: ‘At sunset, find the smallest moving shadow and follow it until it disappears.’ Send the instruction to five willing people in different places. Ask each person to return the date, local time, location, one sentence, and one photograph or short sound recording. Make participation optional, avoid trespass or risk, and ask people to exclude faces or private information unless everyone involved has agreed to their use.

George Brecht’s event scores compress a possible performance into a few words. Mieko Shiomi’s Spatial Poems sent events across distance and gathered participants’ reports into collective works. After your responses arrive, preserve their differences. Place them in time order, arrange them by weather, map their distances, or let a repeated word determine the sequence. Add a short account of writing the instruction and waiting for its results, but do not explain what each participant should have discovered. The final work may become a distributed poem, a map, a web page, or a small publication. Its subject is partly the instruction and partly the worlds that answered it.

Let the images decide the story

Gather seven images from a tarot deck, postcards, family photographs, a museum database, or magazines headed for recycling. If the images belong to other people, keep track of their sources and permissions. Lay them in a line without choosing the order too carefully. Assign each one a narrative function: speaker, setting, desire, obstruction, guide, change, or aftermath. Spend five minutes describing what each image literally contains before you interpret it. Then write the story that passes through all seven. The images should determine at least one event you would never have chosen on your own.

Shuffle the same images and write the story again. Keep the central figure, but allow the new order to change motives, causes, and endings. Italo Calvino built The Castle of Crossed Destinies from characters who use tarot cards to tell their stories, allowing the same images to support intersecting narratives. Your two drafts will show which parts of the story came from the cards and which ideas you carried into every arrangement. Combine them only after you have compared their pressure points. A diptych, branching text, or narrated slide sequence may preserve the disagreement better than a single settled version.

Reconstruct a stranger from the edges

Ask a willing collaborator to lend you a harmless, ordinary document with personal details removed: a grocery list, library receipt, packing list, calendar page, or set of browser tabs. Spend an hour following only what the document makes observable. Look up the books, foods, places, or objects it names. Mark every inference you feel tempted to make about the person. Then interview the collaborator about the document itself rather than asking for a general autobiography. What was happening that day? Which item mattered? What did they leave off? Give them the choice to withdraw any detail before you write.

Create two portraits. The first uses only the document and your clearly labeled inferences. The second uses what the person chose to tell you. Put the portraits beside each other and write a short third section about the distance between them. Sophie Calle’s investigations show the narrative charge of following partial traces, though some of her methods also raise serious questions about privacy and consent. Make those questions part of your form. The collaborator should be able to recognize the agreement under which the piece was made. What remains unknowable will often carry more force than a cleverly completed character sketch.

Translate one subject through five forms

Choose one subject produced by any earlier exercise and spend a day moving it through five forms. Write a three-hundred-word prose account. Make a fourteen-line poem. Create a sequence of five photographs or drawings. Record one minute of sound. Finish with a map or a set of instructions. Work quickly enough that each version responds to the last. Repetition is welcome. The point is to notice which details each medium can hold and which ones it drops. A photograph may keep the arrangement of objects while losing their temperature. A sound recording may preserve distance and hide the source. A poem may make the gap useful.

Spread the five versions out together and mark what survives every translation. Also mark the material that appears in only one form. Build a final work around that disagreement. You might pair the sound with a text that refuses to describe it, print the map beside a memory that cannot be located, or turn the photographs into an instruction for someone elsewhere. Keep the seams visible. A hybrid work gains much of its energy from the places where its media fail to match. This final exercise can also become a method for revising any draft that has gone flat: move the subject elsewhere, then bring back what the new form discovered.

How to use these writing prompts

Choose the exercise that produces a little curiosity or resistance and stay with it for the full period. Keep the gathering stage loose and the final shaping stage deliberate. Date your notes, preserve your sources, and retain the failed photographs, awkward drawings, unanswered messages, and wrong turns until the piece is finished. They show where your attention changed direction. If an exercise yields nothing you want to publish, it may still alter how you walk through a street, hear a room, or enter a book the next day.

Over time, I have become more interested in teaching reading than teaching writing, especially if reading means engaging more deeply with the world around us. Poetry keeps asking two questions that matter well beyond literature: What does this mean? What does it mean in context? Those questions slow interpretation down. They make room for history, sound, ambiguity, and other people’s experience. They also help us notice when an attractive explanation has outrun the evidence.

If you want more material to work from, browse the International Poetry Library, read How to Understand Poetry, or spend time with the books on my translated poetry Bookshop list. Follow one poet, translator, press, place, or reference farther than you planned. The next thing to write about may be waiting inside the route you take to understand something else.

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