Photograph courtesy of Lucy Ives.

The novelist and critic Lucy Ives began composing writing prompts, sometimes spontaneously in classes she was teaching. These prompts grew to a collection of three hundred and sixty-five, which will be published as a book this year. We wanted to share some of them with you here. They are unusually precise prompts, many of which aim to activate your memory or descriptive faculty; they’re appropriate for writers of all ages and levels of experience. You’ll need a writing implement and a surface and occasionally a smartphone or computer, but the majority of the work will actually happen in your head. Ives writes, “These prompts won’t solve all your problems or even any of your problems. They might make something happen.”

Distraction Diary

If you work at a computer, keep a running account of what you are thinking at moments when, instead of continuing a task, you have a tendency to turn to “frivolous” or “unnecessary” pursuits, such as digging through social media, stalking esoteric DJs, or trawling eBay. Note your thoughts and impulses at these moments. Consider allowing the note-taking to replace the activity you had thought to turn toward. Remain aimless, if possible. Observe, describe; write things you didn’t mean to write and think things you didn’t mean to think.

Exercise for Eloquence

Write a story in which the narrator refuses to tell the story. Permit the narrator to come close to telling the story—perhaps to long to tell the story, to speculate about how much fun it would be to tell the story, to stumble and almost tell the story, to attempt (and fail) to speak about other things.

Taste Test

Write a detailed description of the process of drinking a glass of water, eating an apple, or the act of ingesting some other small meal. Renovate your conception of what constitutes an event.

Mysteries of Scale

This is an exercise designed to encourage one to rethink relationships of time and narrative—and, above all, how events occur in writing.

Try one or more of the following:

1. Compose a novel that takes place over the course of three sentences. The plot must begin, unfold, and end.

2. Compose a three-page novel. All actions and events must be represented in this space and your three-page novel should have at least one hallmark of a more “standard” novel: revelation, reversal of fortune, love and loss, adventure, dissolution of the self, villainy, redemption, transformation, and so on.

3. Write a two-page sentence. If possible, this sentence should not tell a story but should rather have all the features of a single sentence: being a contingent entity that plays a role and makes no attempt to say everything that might be said.

4. Write a thirty-page sentence. If you can do this, you are ready for the big leagues!

5. Write a hundred-word story. Set it aside for three months, then return to it and expand it by roughly seven thousand and nine hundred words.

Try inventing other possibly inappropriate or risky pairings of quantity of writing and genre.

Zwicky Box

This method is based on a matrixial tool identified by the Bulgarian Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky (who, as it so happens, discovered dark matter). You can use the method for various things, but let’s imagine it as a tool for writing a story.

Across the top of your matrix/spreadsheet, write a series of categories, such as “Location,” “Problem,” “Loss,” “People,” “Genre,” “Weather,” and so on. These will be the titles of your columns. Now, fill each of the columns out with various contents. If I’m filling out the “Location” column, I might try things like:

at home

on a cloud

Philadelphia

Urmia, Iran

fifty years into the future

Manhattan in the nineties

And so on.

After I have populated all my columns, I will create a series of different combinations, taking one item from each column to produce a series of qualities for a story, one that takes place in Philadelphia, includes a global health crisis, is about divorce, concerns artists, is written as a picaresque, and features a meteor shower, for example.

Continue to explore combinations until you find one that feels particularly impossible or strange and unexpected or vivid to you.

Write this story.

Walk-Through

Draw a floor plan of a house, apartment, or other building. Make this diagram more or less detailed, depending on your preference, and include doors, windows, furnishings, or other contents.

Now write a story about what takes place here, using the diagram in some significant way.

Outline

Watch a film with the sound off.

Make a verbal transcription of what you see. Even if you know the names of the characters and what is understood to be taking place, try to keep your descriptions of the action, protagonists, and scenery as neutral as possible.

“A young person stares into space in a gray room.”

“A red car slows near a blue pile of rocks.”

Later, use the objectivity you’ve attempted to cultivate to perceive your own perceptions without judgement. When you reexamine this writing, see what sorts of narrative(s) you loaned to the movie—relationships, motivations, desires you (and only you) could perceive.

Snail’s Story

Here is an exercise for people who don’t have any time to write, as well as for people who do. It is also an exercise for people who want to experiment with writing slowly.

Make a pact with yourself that over the course of a long period—a year, five years—you will write a short story, making very small amounts of progress each day (the “each day” part is very important).

Constraint: you may not write more than twenty words of the story on any given day.

If you write twenty words per day, in one year you can write a seven-thousand-word story. If you write five words per day, in five years you can write a nine-thousand-word story.

Decide how long you would like your story to be and how long you would like to work on it, and adjust the words per day (i.e., the snail’s step) accordingly.

Nonevents

This is an exercise of sneaking up on and exploring the nature of narrative events. You’ll need a current—or, not current, it’s not totally crucial—newspaper or magazine. Print is best. You’ll be looking for something apparently unimportant in it.

Examine an article in which something takes place. Select a detail related to an action or activity that is tangential to whatever is treated as significant in the prose. NB: this will not be easy.

For example, I’m reading page A11 of the New York Times of Friday, January 5, 2024, and seeing sentences such as “Ms. Cox bought her son a version of a Nintendo console called a RetroN, which used the same hardware as the original Nintendo console, from a pawnshop, as well as an old cathode-ray tube television to help him get started” and “I’m looking at a couple perched on the roof of the park bathroom and a couple in a tree fort right now.”

Find moments of stillness within such descriptions, moments directed away from the underlined events at hand, as well as unarticulated perspectives and subjectivities. Who is present in these moments? What do they know? What don’t they know? What do they believe the future holds? What would they say if asked to describe the past? How do their stories differ from the one ostensibly offered to the reader?

Write something based on what you find.

Three Exercises for Improved Misunderstanding

These prompts may provoke reflection regarding the ways in which meaning stalls or, paradoxically, carries on despite unintelligibility. Certainly, they can give you some hints regarding character(s), as well as the probable location of your reader.

Another thing to consider: misunderstanding’s relationship to survival.

Here are the three exercises:

1. Write a scene in which an event is withheld from the reader.

2. Write a dialogue between two characters, one of whom cannot hear what the other is saying.

3. Create a character who sees something no one else does. This thing should either be very large or very small.

three six five: prompts, acts, divinations (an inexhaustible compendium for writing) will be published by Siglio in May.

Lucy Ives is a novelist and critic. Her most recent books are Life Is Everywhere: A Novel and An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays, the winner of the 2024 Vermont Book Award in Creative Nonfiction.