Writing Exercises

The Sum of Its Parts

"What's the use, Joel?" she said.

"At noon I will fall in love."

The Red Retro Chair

Everything depends on the red retro chair.

Money 3

The shelves were both empty and full. A mustiness that spoke of dead books written in dead languages, cereal that had been on the shelf too long, and the garage corners piled with old clothes pushed into my nostrils.

In A Bookstore Cafe

Perhaps you would like to try.

Fruita Revisited

Apple trees and redrock cliffs. Lawns next to a turquoise river. Fields where cows graze and mule deer come out of the desert canyons to eat the grass and nibble the gnarly fruits that have fallen from the trees.

A Dark World and Wide

Gravity pulls you down toe-ways

as the shout to your rear comes

surfing on the wired zeer of wheels.

A Night Off

I'm taking the night off.

Don't Even Try to Explain It To Me
I have just finished two exercises in Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind, first spending twenty minutes writing about everything I did...

Two Short Essays on Vacations

Vacations, I told my father, weren't for work.

Portrait of an Inner Critic

He looks a lot like me except he doesn't wear a beard.

Free for All!

I've often dived off the rocks at Crystal Cove, gone under, and broken the surface hoping that a sea change takes place.

If I Die, I Will Miss....

At the Wednesday writing group, I broke the ice with an exercise in which we wrote down those things that we would miss when we were dead.

An Exercise in Self Deprecation

Thanks to all the people who heckled and belittled me in the last two weeks. You provided great material for this and by the time I was finished writing, I was laughing very hard.

Some Orange poems

I'm mad about orange.

I'm mad at orange.

Poison Tree

Last month when I told my mother about my discovery, she said "Your stupid grandfather ate lots of those berries and they never killed him."

Cut from My Notebooks

I laid out a cross deliberately.

With what fierce thirst for penance I have tried to mortify in myself the throbbing of the flesh, and make myself wholly transparent to the love of Jesus crucified.

Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that men's food consists entirely of souls.

Oh Fuck.

For another exercise in the group, I had members draw three cards from a deck I'd prepared in advance.

Wednesday Writing: Of Monks and Tobacco Allotments

How could a crew of nonviolent monks sleep knowing that their land produced warring cancer cells in the lungs?

An Exercise

Tonight's writing exercise involved using three words pulled at random in a composition. The three words were:

• extinguished
• variegated
• languid

Excerpt from Writing Practice

Most of my characters are neurotic.