Ordinary Magic for the First Week of the New Year

Five Unusual Writing Exercises and One Everyday Incantation

Now, who wants to write not just more, but also better, in the year ahead?

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. These are practices which (much like meditation and mindfulness) require lifelong devotion. We never “arrive,” we just get closer and sturdier and more attuned to when the channel between us, the world, and the words is wide open. This is when we are “doing language” at the highest level.

Writing that is alive wakes readers up, makes them feel something. The writing I love best utterly devastates me and makes me hopeful all at once. But how does it do that?

I believe such writing happens at the exciting intersection of the what and the how (i.e., the content and the craft). Yes, 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 learned and practiced. That is why I am always seeking to understand and reveal 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 especially stunning published work with structured writing exercises.

Therefore, this is what I have provided you here: five structured writing exercises to complete in the first week of the new year, 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 Cheryl Strayed, and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. Other writers whose work I turn to repeatedly for similar 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, 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, 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. You can also do the five exercises over and over again, because they are 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!