In this exercise, we are going to build an essay, piece of fiction or a poem with inspiration from fiction writers Ron Carlson and Lisa Shea and poet Bill Matthews.

You’ll start, without knowing where this might lead, by imitating the style, grammar and strategies these writers used in the journal excerpts they contributed to The Writer’s Journal: 40 Writer’s and Their Journals, a book I conceived and edited in 1996.

Ron Carlson’s journaling technique was to collect distracting and entertaining phrases that jumped to his mind while he was writing something else or was between projects. He numbered the “strange and distracting odd bits” and sometimes used them in future pieces of writing. Here are three tidbits from his published list:

30. They discovered that the elevator in their dilapidated building acted as a bellows for the air conditioning, so they sent the child out an hour every afternoon to ride up and down.

38. Getting off the phone, she always put a fire in the excuse.

271. You can tell by the way people drive in a city how many lies have been told there.

Begin your “writing without knowing where you are going” exercise by imitating Carlson’s grammar. Your tidbits can be in the first, second or third person. They can be true, exaggerated or imagined. For example:

I discovered that the hole I was digging myself into had no end, so I just kept digging.
I discovered that changing my mind about the red dress with white polka dots changed the way I presented myself to the world.
I discovered that sitting alone at a desk was more fun if there was a window that looked out onto the water.

Balancing on the edge of the pool, the young girl in her bikini put a little MTV into her performance.
Toasting bread in the morning, she put her day’s hopes in with the bread like a dusting of confectioner’s sugar.

You can tell by the way students stare past their professors in front of them how little the world has changed.
You can tell by the way he pets her dog that he is trying hard to please her.
You can tell by the way the man behind the desk scratches his nose as he thinks that he is never really sure about anything though he knows people think he is supposed to be.

****

Continue building this piece about which you have no idea what it will become by studying and borrowing from Lisa Shea’s contributed journaling strategy:

March 4, 1995

When I came across the word lovage in the newspaper this morning, in an article on English herbs, I thought of two other words–love and age–and right away I knew I wanted to write about these words, to put down something of their meaning, to see what I have learned from them, taken together and apart, in the eight months since my marriage ended.

I want to know where I am with love, and with age, and what is the proper fit of my heart, and how I will go on out of that need, out of all the knowing that I do not yet know.

Love first. Because it is harder, more ineffable, bigger, dumber, more wondrous, harder truer, falser….

Love is a lie. It is pure truth. It is a sickness, and in perfect health, till death do us part, partake, take apart. It is a small green park, a moat, a chimney, a purple rock. Love lies there seducing you with its gorgeous hair and eyes, it’s muscled back.

Age. The thing we wear, our first skin, and into it and out of it we shrink and expand, elongate and contact, shrivel and stretch. Age carries us on its back, as we carry our children, and they us. It is newborn and unborn and reborn…

Age bears down as it flies up, coming round like sniper’s fire and feathers, …

So there are love and age and how they separate and combine, mysterious herbs in a strange garden…as the days accumulate away from an ending that was large and long, full of love’s terrible labor, the gorgeous, grotesque garden of our making and unmaking.

Listen again to the phrase “Love is a lie. It is pure truth.” Take an intangible that pops into your head and talk about it in opposites: hate, joy, sorrow, imagination, frustration, beauty, success and failure, to name a few. Make two simple opposing statements using the word you choose. “Success is sweet; It is as bitter as unripe apples.”

Now give your word an ability to perceive like Shea does when she says love seduces with its gorgeous hair and eyes and muscled back. In my example, I might say, “Success lies in wait like my cat watching my toes wiggle under the covers. Its eyes remain unblinking; only its whiskers twitch. I know it will puncture my skin with its sharpened nails.”

Next, freewrite for ten to twenty minutes telling a little story or anecdote about a time you dealt with the notion you are writing about. I might write about the time I helped seventh-grade students perform the play Our Town, and despite the community’s support and the students’ joy and pride in their production, I was cast out of the fold by the other teachers in the school. They did not like an untenured teacher energizing things to a level higher than the one with which they were comfortable.

Put your version of the exercise on the same page as a selection of your Carlsonesque tidbits. Separate the sections with asterisks to guide readers to the leap you are making:

You can tell by the way students stare past their professors in front of them how little the world has changes.

I discovered that the hole I was digging myself into had no end, so I just kept digging.

I discovered that sitting alone at a desk was more fun if there was a window that looked out onto the water.

****

Thirdly, work in the manner William Matthews did with his musings, also published in The Writer’s Journal: 40 Writers and Their Journals:

A morally sentimental 1968 rhyme: Nazi/ROTC

Is it more interesting to distinguish between different levels of evil than between different levels of good, or just easier?

As a boy, I thought “good” was monolithic, and so I remember vividly the first time I heard the phrase “too kind.” Who spoke of whom? Where? When? I don’t remember. But the monolith began to crumble. Some loose pebbles, some rocks, next boulders, and then an avalanche.

White southern women: “She’s too kind.”
Urban black boys: “He’s bad.”

Irony is not a defense against emotion. It’s an emotion about the relationship between words and emotion.

But then, emotion is a poor defense against irony. “Only a man with a heart of stone could read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” (Oscar Wilde)

German food critic: “The wurst is full of passionate intensity.”
Of course it is a dumb joke. Are jokes about being smart? Are smart jokes about being dumb?

Sebastian has asked me to give–to reinvent–one of the traditional blessings for his wedding to Ali.

I who’ve blessed my marriages with divorce
as a man shoots a broken-legged horse.

An uncouplet.

Try it with me: write down a silly rhyme that comes to mind from childhood or college or one you hear circulating now:

I stand before you
to stand behind you to tell
you something I know nothing about.

Write down a quote, something you have read or heard recently that you might be associating to from the rhyme you jotted down:

“If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” –Samuel Goldwyn on script writing

Now write down something someone has asked you to do for them recently:

Tell me what is at the end of her notebooks. Is there a hint of where she was going next?

Go back to each Matthews-like section you have just written and fill in philosophical musings to make three passages:

“I stand before you to stand behind you to tell you something I know nothing about.” As children, we memorized the passage delicious in its nonsense and inversion of all that we were learning to be. “Wear your best clothes if you haven’t any, and if you can come, please stay at home.” The contradictions made us laugh at the way the world didn’t seem to match what people told us it would be like.

Today my husband quotes Hollywood studio head Samuel Goldwyn about what he told his writers, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” And today, a student of my late friend, the poet Paula Jones Gardiner, asks me what is at the end of the personal notebooks her widowed husband gave me. The student wants to know what direction her missing teacher may have been going.

I bend my head to the task of reading my friend’s words, our email conversation about poem revisions. I stand before the task to stand behind it, hoping to succeed at energizing the task of writing about her.

****

Now that you have created tidbits, a meditation, and musings, see if you can fold them into one piece of writing with a title. Allow this writing to present itself in parts that are separated by asterisks:

To Answer You

Success is sweet. It is as bitter as unripe apples. Success lies in wait like my cat. Its eyes remain unblinking; only its whiskers twitch. I know it will puncture my skin with its sharpened nails. When I helped seventh-grade students perform the play Our Town, the other teachers cast me out of the fold. I had energized things to a level higher than the one with which they were comfortable.

****

“I stand before you to stand behind you to tell you something I know nothing about.” As children, we memorized the passage delicious in its nonsense and inversion of all that we were learning to be. “Wear your best clothes if you haven’t any, and if you can come, please stay at home.” The contradictions made us laugh at the way the world didn’t seem to match what people told us it would be like.

Today my husband quotes Hollywood studio head Samuel Goldwyn, what he told his writer’s, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” And today, a student of my late friend, the poet Paula Jones Gardiner, asks me what is at the end of the personal notebooks her widowed husband gave me. The student wants to know what direction her missing teacher may have been going.

I bend my head to the task of reading my friend’s words, our email conversation about poem revisions.

I stand before the task to stand behind it, feeling alone, hoping to succeed at energizing myself for the task of writing about her.

****

I discovered that sitting alone at a desk held more possibilities if there was a window that looked out onto the water.

Playful inventing without a definite outcome in mind allows you to explore a topic close to your heart that you may not have otherwise been able to focus. It allows you to find the strong core in your subject, the charged, lyric words and phrases that mine your experience for mood, for wisdom and for the opportunity to connect heart-to-heart with yourself and others.