In 2024 I sought some short books to read and pad out my count before the year ended. Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph seemed like the perfect book to help me hit my goal. Each page had only a handful of notes, some as short as a sentence, or a fragment. I should be able to finish reading it in a day. I was so wrong. I still haven’t finished reading the book even though I’m constantly picking it up.

And that’s because every line of the book is a world of meaning. I sit down to read the book and at most, I finish a single page before I’m staring blankly at the margins pondering the nature of art.

Don’t miss out on this week’s exercises where we’ll learn to write with Bresson’s restraint.

Today's Exercise

The Restraint of Bresson

Robert Bresson made movies by stripping out precisely what other directors thought made a movie. Instead of actors he employed what he called models, whom he shaped into characters with endless repetition. Sound was not allowed to repeat what the image already showed. Emotion was not manipulated with music or performance. Instead, emotion was drawn out by cutting the unnecessary interference of the artist’s overt intentions.

Notes on the Cinematograph is taken from the journal he kept. It’s not a manual. It’s more of a fragment of a book full of fragments. Each entry stops the reader in their tracks and insists they think.

Each of Bresson’s notes approaches the same basic problem from a different angle: how does the maker get out of the way from between the audience and the screen? This week applies that question to the page.

The Central Skill

The seven exercises this week share a single underlying idea: withhold what the reader can decode on their own. Don’t perform the emotion, let it arise from the recorded moment. Don’t narrate what the action is already showing. Don’t supply the cause; supply the reaction, and trust the reader to reconstruct what caused it.

That’s the move underpinning all of Bresson, and it’s a move that works in prose as well. The words are loud when the writer does all the work. It goes quiet when the reader’s imagination is bringing the page to life.

What We’ll Practice

Each day takes one of Bresson’s practices and ports it to writing.

• Monday — Mechanism and Feeling.
  Bresson’s “models” repeated each action until it went automatic. The performance dropped out and something truer took its place. Practice this on the page: write the same act ten times, twenty if you can, and watch emotion arise once you stop trying to put it there.

• Tuesday — Effect Before Cause.
  Open with the reaction. Make the reader feel the force of something before they understand what it was. The gap is where the reader leans in.

• Wednesday — What Objects Discuss.
  A character enters someone’s home. Render the absent occupant entirely through what the visitor sees — no inference, no narration, only the room. When the occupant arrives the reader should already know what the objects already told them.

• Thursday — Passing the Baton.
  Bresson: what is for the eye must not duplicate what is for the ear. Two channels, two jobs. Practice writing dialogue and narration that refuse to repeat what the other says, even when they share the same scene.

• Friday — The Automatic Action.
  The performed gesture lies. Involuntary gestures are the real tells. Drop habitual, unconscious actions into a conversation that matters to the character without telling the reader what they mean.

• Saturday — Make Readers Divine.
  Bresson again: accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people diviners. One character speaks openly. The other listens. End with a single reaction that expresses what wasn’t said.

• Sunday — Lines Wanting Company.
  Write sentences that feel alive but incomplete, as if they belong to something larger you haven’t written yet. Ten of them. A practice in the suggestive fragment — the form Bresson perfected with his notes.

How They Fit Together

The seven exercises cluster into three moves.

• No Intention — Get past the writer’s intentions so something truer can land. Monday’s repetition practices a single action, while Friday’s automatic gestures reveal what no deliberate detail could.

• Split Channels — Refuse to let two parts of the page say the same thing. Tuesday breaks cause from effect in time, while Thursday breaks the ear from what the eye sees.

• Divination — Hand the reader less and trust them to complete the whole picture. Wednesday lets the absent occupant emerge from their possessions, while Saturday focuses a single reaction, and Sunday emerges from a fragment.

The whole week pulls in one direction: less intention, more inference. By Sunday you should be able to look at a paragraph of your own and ask one question of it: What am I doing that the reader could do instead?

That’s the skill. The rest of the week is reps.

Leave a comment

A new chapter begins for Writing Streak! The Streak Saver writing exercises now have their own page. Bookmark it. Visit it every day for a new writing exercise.

The Today page on Writing Streak is a lightweight application that walks through daily writing exercises step-by-step, keeping cognitive load light. No more saving exercises in your inbox for later (and then forgetting them). Do the daily exercises as they drop, or they disappear. It’s a feature, not a failure. We’re trying to use psychology here.

This frees the newsletter up for in-depth walkthroughs of each week’s theme. You can just sit back and read and decide for yourself if you’re willing to tackle this week’s challenge.

And this week we’re digging into the details. This is actually where I started back in October of 2023, when I first started posting daily writing exercises on my previous, poorly-named newsletter. This newsletter has come a long way.

Today's Exercise

First, a Description

Description feels like ornamentation, like a layer you add on top of the story. Really, though, it’s the physical form of the story. Every detail on the page points. It frames the reader’s attention, sets expectations, and gestures towards a conclusion. Pick the wrong detail and the scene loses focus. Pick the right words and the ink will disappear into the page as the world draws into focus.

This week is about learning to interrogate the details.

The Central Skill

The seven exercises this week share a single underlying question: what does this specific detail do to the reader? Or should I say, “What does the reader do with this specific detail?”

• “Is this beautiful prose?” Who cares?

• “Is this accurate?” Whatever.

That’s not what we’re here for this week. This week, we want to know about when a detail lands and when it doesn’t. Where does it send the reader’s attention? What does it imply? How much of the scene does it carry?

Ask that question on every line and description stops being decoration. It becomes the sharpest tool in the toolkit.

What We’ll Practice

Each exercise this week tunes a different dial.

• Monday, May 18th — Sensory Zoom In
  Resolution frames space. Practice writing description that moves the reader’s perspective from far to near. The reader feels their approach towards the object.

• Tuesday, May 19th — Dial of Density
  Compression versus expansion. The same setting can be sketched in two lines or rendered in two pages, depending on what the story needs.

• Wednesday, May 20th — Filtered Through Desire
  Point of view is a lens that colors the world. What a character wants rearranges the space around that desire and shows up in the description.

• Thursday, May 21st — The Swapped Detail
  Details drive the reader’s inferences. Three details about a character imply a conclusion; swap one and the conclusion flips. Which detail was doing the heavy lifting?

• Friday, May 22nd — Expect the Unexpected
  Information is proportional to surprise. Unfamiliar elements need more real estate than familiar ones. Practice supplying surprise with the room it needs to feel real.

• Saturday, May 23rd — The Alien Artifact
  Get familiar with defamiliarization. Describe something ordinary through eyes that have never seen it. The reader recognizes it and sees something new about the familiar world.

• Sunday, May 24th — Years of Experience

  The habitual aspect. Everybody uses it, but they rarely notice. It’s how you introduce a character not through a single moment but through the patterns you know them by.

How They Fit Together

Five of the exercises tune the “what” of what you describe: zoom, density, filtering, testing, and proportion. The final two exercise tune the “when”. When in time does the description live: a singular first encounter, or a lifetime of habit? Together they give you a working vocabulary for the decisions you’re already making, implicitly, every time you write a scene.

By Sunday you should be able to look at any descriptive passage in your own work and answer three questions about it.

• What resolution is this written at?

• Whose desire is filtering what we see?

• Which single detail carries the load?

That’s the skill set. The rest of the week is reps.

Let me know what you think of the new format. Do you agree it makes more sense to move the exercises to their own page? Does this preview entice you to write this week?

Leave a comment

Willy Wonka was wrong. The man who gets everything, whose horizons are unlimited, often falls flat on his face. That is one of the big ideas from David Epstein’s new book Inside The Box: How Constraints Makes Us Better. Less is more. More is mid.

This newsletter is all about constraints, so I decided I should read the book.

I should read the book, but I shelved that idea for the moment and watched some interviews about the book instead (it’s on my TBR). I did not watch the interviews passively, though. I jotted down notes to distill the core ideas into a tightly constrained listicle that jettisons all the interesting stories and dramatic turns that clutter the interviews and book. Less is more, they say.

Lessons from Inside the Box

1. Satisfice, don’t maximize. Stop agonizing over making the perfect choice. Good enough gets more done.

2. Stop starting, start finishing. When the work gets tough, a fresh start provides instant gratification but also adds overhead. Finishing feels even better — it clears attentional residue.

3. Subtract before you add. Everything you add incurs a cost. By subtracting, you might actually find balance with fewer costs.

4. Batch all the loose ends. Task-switching derails focus. Collect the loose ends that snag your focus into batches and bundles you process together. Segregate them from deep work.

5. Block the normal way to find the new way. We all default to our strengths because that path offers the least resistance. Stop using our strengths, and we discover new paths.

6. See constraints as tools, not obstacles. The true story of famous inventions often shows that inspiration arises from adaptation. The obstacle creates a need for discovery.

7. Reflect on effect. Take a pause to reflect on the effect. Reflection outperforms blind repetition.

8. Narrate your values. There are infinite problems in the world, but each of us individually has limited strength. Narrate the values that have guided your life so you know where to focus.

9. Build high fences around open pastures. Too many ideas? Not enough discipline. That’s fine. Don’t sweat it. Give yourself space to wander, but set hard boundaries. The boundaries actually let you explore the limited space more fully.

10. Don’t be afraid to sample. This is more from his other book Range, but worth mentioning. It’s beneficial to try new things. Specialization often leads to strain, burnout, and injury.

» 🪦 Streak Saver Exercise: One Arm Tied

🎯 Goal: Immersion. Make the reader feel the tension and emotional weight of a conflict without using your default mode of delivering emotional information.

🚧 Constraints:

• Describe a conflict between two characters without your go-to move.

• Make the emotional reaction clear in the text.

• Write until the moments relaxes or someone leaves.

Modification: For added complexity, use your go-to move to imply the opposite reaction while using other techniques to convey true feelings.

Reflection: Did the ban force you towards an unfamiliar move? Did that move produce any interesting results?

» Streak Saver Exercise: Fifty-Word Room

🎯 Goal: Immersion. Use a severely restricted word-palette to create a sense of sameness and repetition.

🚧 Constraints:

• Use no more that 50 words to describe the scene, repeated as many times as you like.

• Eyeball it. Don’t get bogged down tracking the number of words exactly.

• Stop when you feel absolutely stuck.

Modification: To get a better sense of what is being removed with each word chosen, start this exercise by listing 50 different items in the space you are describing.

Reflection: Was this exercise simply maddening, or did it produce something interesting?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Elemental Table

🎯 Goal: Engagement. Write a paragraph that leaves out one element while still pointing towards it.

🚧 Constraints:

• Pick one of the elements to exclude.

• Write a paragraph introducing the other elements.

• Let the paragraph point toward the excluded object without mentioning it directly.

Reflection: How effective do you feel the paragraph works at gesturing towards what is missing?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Three Pitches

🎯 Goal: Increase engagement by deliberately choosing how the scene unfolds.

🚧 Constraints:

• Brainstorm three different ways to start, move through, and end the scene.

• Choose one plan, or mix elements from each, to create the most intrigue.

• Write the scene as planned.

Reflection: Did the extra time spent brainstorming turn up any ideas better than the original?

» Streak Saver Exercise: Diagnosing Narrative Indigestion

🎯 Goal: Immersion. Maintain the sense of overwhelm for the character without overloading the reader’s brain.

🚧 Constraints:

• Try writing the scene with all five elements happening concurrently.

• If you feel stuck, remove one element and try again. Repeat as needed.

• Stop when you feel the right level of chaos.

Reflection: What are the signs that a scene is carrying too much?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Conformity Draft

🎯 Goal: Immersion. Lean into cliche and tropes deliberately to make them visible.

🚧 Constraints:

• Write the scene loaded with every cliche you can think of.

• Don’t try to make it good.

• Stop when you’ve run out of cliches.

Modification: For more complexity, rewrite the scene without any of the cliches and tropes used in the original.

Reflection: Which of the cliches exist because they are natural parts of the scene? Which exist because they are an easy tool to use?

» Streak Saver Exercise: Adjusting the Scope

🎯 Goal: Balance immersion and engagement by adjusting the scope of a scene.

🚧 Constraints:

• Scale down: Write the scene as a single short paragraph.

• Scale up: Describe the scene as a single multi-page chapter.

• End by deciding on a scale that would work best for the scene.

Reflection: Did the scene end up needing more or less space than you initially imagined?

» Streak Saver Exercise: Stop the Start

🎯 Goal: Immersion. Keep the reader engaged throughout the scene by not losing momentum at the end.

🚧 Constraints:

• Start writing the end of the scene.

• Next, write the middle of the scene.

• Finish with the beginning you imagined.

Reflection: In your own drafts, do your endings receive the same attention as your beginnings?

Leave a comment

We usually boil point of view down to a few basic forms like limited, omniscient, 3rd person, 1st person, or free indirect discourse. But really, POV is unlimited, fractured, and full of possibility. A viewpoint can be real, or completely imaginary. There are an infinite number of ways to slice up reality beyond the standard set.

I’m not going to say much more. The exercises speak for themselves.

» 🪦 Streak Saver Exercise: What the Narrator Can’t Process

🎯 Goal: Make the reader experience the space through this character's specific perceptual filter.

🚧 Constraints:

• The narrator consistently over-attends to one category of experience or under-attends to another.

• The narrator never comments on or explains their own perceptual difference.

• Write half a page or more.

Modification: Have a second character refer to something their perceptual bias would normally cause them to miss.

Reflection: What does a consistent perceptual filter give the reader?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Obvious Blind Spot

🎯 Goal: Create engagement by making the reader recognize that this relationship is unhealthy, imbalanced, or destructive, while the narrator remains genuinely convinced it's wonderful.

🚧 Constraints:

• The narrator cannot express any doubt about the relationship. Every statement must be positive.

• The evidence that contradicts the narrator's assessment must come through concrete details.

• Write one page.

Modification: Remove all adjectives and adverbs that evaluate the relationship positively.

Reflection: What kinds of details did you find most effective for carrying information the narrator doesn't recognize?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Sliding Lens

🎯 Goal: Write a passage that begins with the character but pulls outward until the reader is seeing the character from the outside.

🚧 Constraints:

• The passage moves in one direction, from close to distant.

• The transition must happen across at least four distinct distances: deep thought, sensory awareness, immediate surroundings, wider scene.

• Write half a page to a full page.

Reflection: What does the reader gain or lose when you increase distance from a character in an emotional moment?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Pattern Instead of the Scene

🎯 Goal: Make the reader feel the weight and texture of the routine so when the passage ends, the reader anticipates the coming change.

🚧 Constraints:

• No specific scene. Every sentence describes a routine,

• Use habitual markers: “would,” “always,” “every Tuesday,” “never once,” “sometimes,” “on good days.”

• End with a single sentence that shifts out of habitual mode into a specific scene.

Reflection: What kept the passage interesting without any single event driving it forward?

» Streak Saver Exercise: Contradicting Interiors

🎯 Goal: Make the reader see clearly what both characters are getting wrong about each other.

🚧 Constraints:

• Alternate between the two characters' perspectives three times.

• Each character must misinterpret something the reader knows because they've been inside the other character's head.

• Write one page.

Reflection: When might preserving one character's mystery be more effective?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Technically Truthful Account

🎯 Goal: Write the account so that a reader on first reading accepts it as complete.

🚧 Constraints:

• The omitted fact never appears in the passage.

• The narrator cannot lie. The concealment is achieved entirely through what is not mentioned.

• Write one page.

Reflection: What's the difference between this kind of withholding and simply not giving the reader enough information?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Epistemic Bridge

🎯 Goal: Introduce this character to the reader so that they feel like a real, known person.

🚧 Constraints:

• The narrator cannot describe the friend as though seeing them for the first time.

• The reader must learn at least three significant things that emerge from the narrator's natural associations, reactions, or habits.

• Write half a page.

Reflection: What strategies did you find for conveying information the narrator already has without it feeling like the narrator is explaining for the reader's benefit?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Talk of the Town

🎯 Goal: Immerse the reader in the community's collective curiosity and the observed person's externality. Employ a first-person plural "we" narrator that feels like a living thing.

🚧 Constraints:

• Narrate entirely in first-person plural. The narrator is "we" throughout.

• Step around the observed person's voice. Only the collective speaks.

• Write one page.

Modification: Include one moment where the collective "we" fractures and disagrees without falling into individual perspectives.

Reflection: How did the "we" voice change the kind of information you could include?

Leave a comment

In 1985, Italo Calvino planned to travel to Harvard where he would present a series of lectures, but he died of a stroke a short time before he finished packing his suitcase. The lectures were called Six Memos for the Next Millennium, but only five of the six memos were finished and published, leaving a final lecture named “Consistency” unwritten. What a mystery. The missing lecture seems too perfect—almost a final, fantastic jest on Calvino’s part—and it has become legendary. Some writers have even written their own imagined versions of the lecture.

According to his notes, Calvino planned to use Bartleby, the Scrivener as a touchstone for the lecture. Bartleby is known for his catchphrase, “I would prefer not to.” Think of a character from The Office saying this every time they’re told to get to work.

So it seems by “consistency” Calvino meant a refusal to indulge in meaningless work. I like that kind of consistency.

Calvino’s collection of memos were a shield meant to protect the individual writer from the forces of homogeneity and blandness. Each of us is born anew as a blank slate. We are meant to interact with life and process reality with our own senses and faculties, but so often reality processes us. We become a standard cog in a system of mediocrity. It takes a great deal of courage to refuse to fit into the space others leave for us, and a bit of hubris to insist the world bend to our shape. But that is what Calvino wants for us. He wants us to be consistently awesome.

This week’s exercises are inspired by the writing of Italo Calvino. My older brother discovered him before me and pressed his book The Castle of Crossed Destinies into my hands before I left for college. That was decades ago. O, mists of time! For some reason, though, I have ignored Calvino’s other novels despite him being exactly my kind of writer. I latched on to Haruki Murakami, but left Calvino in the lurch. I blame my own inconsistency.

» 🪦 Streak Saver Exercise: The Invisible City

🎯 Goal: Immerse the reader in a space that has texture, atmosphere, and personality without ever describing it physically.

🚧 Constraints:

• Build the named city/town entirely from the habits of the people who live there—their exchanges, their memories, rituals, or refusals.

• No physical descriptions of the setting.

• Write half a page.

Modification: To add complexity, the city/town has an unspoken rule everyone follows without mentioning it.

Reflection: Does the nature of the setting set limits on the characters who live there?

» Streak Saver Exercise: Floating Through the Motions

🎯 Goal: Immerse the reader in the moment, making them feel its full weight through the gap between what’s happened and the casual way its being told.

🚧 Constraints:

• No sentence longer than twelve words.

• The character keeps moving through their everyday activity without performing and emotional reaction.

• Fill half a page.

Modification: To make the exercise more difficult, remove all abstract emotional language.

Reflection: Where did the weight enter your passage despite the light sentences?

» Streak Saver Exercise: Festina Lente

🎯 Goal: Engage the reader with the entire arc of a relationship, not summarized, but experienced through compression.

🚧 Constraints:

• The entire relationship must be told in exactly seven sentences with spans that last days, months, or decades.

• No sentence may state how much time has passed, only hint.

• Seven sentences. No more, no less.

Reflection: How did you decide which seven moments to describe?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Spark of Precision

🎯 Goal: Write unrelated sentences that each use one of the words. Immerse the reader in precise language that produces a spark of recognition.

🚧 Constraints:

• Every sentence must be between six and ten words long.

• No adjective or adverbs may appear. Use precise verbs and nouns.

• No sentence may use a metaphor or simile.

Modification: To add difficulty, rewrite each sentence by replacing one word in each with a more precise word.

Reflection: Which sentence produced the strongest “spark”? What was it about that particular collision of words?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Palomar Observation

🎯 Goal: Immerse the reader by describing an object through increasingly precise observation. The passage should feel like zooming in until the familiar becomes alien.

🚧 Constraints:

• Write three consecutive paragraphs about this single object that notice something previous paragraph missed.

• No comparisons, exposition, or introspection: only direct description of what is actually visible.

• No paragraph may repeat an observation.

Reflection: At what point did the object start to feel unfamiliar?

» Streak Saver Exercise: Making the Self

🎯 Goal: Create engagement by making the reader feel that the routine is not mere habit but essential and existential in nature.

🚧 Constraints:

• Describe the character performing their routine in exact, sequential detail.

• The routine must be plausible, neither magical nor exaggerated.

• The passage ends when the routine is complete.

Modification: For added challenge, something small disrupts the routine, and show how the character responds. The response should frighten the reader more than the disruption.

Reflection: How does showing a character through compulsive action differ from showing them through choice or desire?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Unwritten Memo

🎯 Goal: Make the reader feel that the unfinished document says more than the finished version would have—the truest possible ending.

🚧 Constraints:

• Begin the document with confidence and let it gradually lose certainty to what they’re saying.

• The document must stop mid-thought, reaching toward something they can’t quite articulate.

• Let it stop where it stops, the most important decision you’ll make.

Reflection: When is an unfinished thing more powerful than a finished one? How does deliberate incompleteness differ from loose ends?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Labyrinthine Sentence

🎯 Goal: Expand this single instant into a passage the reader doesn’t want to leave through the density found inside a single second when you really look.

🚧 Constraints:

• One moment. No time passes beyond the instant itself.

• The passage must contain at least three changes of direction, a new thread of observation, association, or sensation.

• One full paragraph for a single instant.

Modification: End the passage with the moment completing, like emerging from the labyrinth back into ordinary time.

Reflection: How is expanding a moment different from slowing it down?

Leave a comment

I know five poems with the title “Happiness” and I wager there are many more I have yet to find. The happinesses I know were written by Carl Sandberg, Raymond Carver, Jane Kenyon, Robert Hass, and Mary Oliver. (If you know more let me know.)

Why happiness? I suppose if we’re going to capture anything in a poem, that would be the elixir to bottle. For Sandberg, happiness can’t be studied or manufactured. As for Carver, he sees happiness as something we can observe in others. It may even be transferable through observation. Kenyon feels she must rehabilitate the reputation of happiness because it comes by so rarely. Hass rediscovers happiness in his notebook when he rereads a few lines that reflect a moment of intimacy. The words carry that happiness forward with him through the day. Finally, Oliver sees happiness in the actions of a she-bear who gorges on honey. The world itself seems to reflect the she-bear’s delight.

This week I’m exploring ineffable poetry based on the techniques used in these five poems titled “Happiness”. But of course these exercises can instruct writers about all kinds of writing. There’s poetry in everything we write.

» 🪦 Streak Saver Exercise: The Missing Title

🎯 Goal: Write a poem. Immerse the reader in a feeling without naming the state or emotion. The poem should be unmistakable in what it’s about without needing the title.

🚧 Constraints:

• The title word (and synonyms) cannot appear anywhere in the poem.

• Every line must contain at least one physical, sensory detail.

• Write until you feel a grand shift.

Modification: To add difficulty, try to capture multiple, distinct views of the ineffable quality.

Reflection: Did you first reach for obvious imagery and where did your images move from there? When would this technique serve a longer piece of writing?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Broken List

🎯 Goal: Write a poem. Create engagement by making the reader feel the subject’s expanding or approaching reach.

🚧 Constraints:

• Employ anaphora: Begin each line with the same phrase or a similar repeated opening about the arrival.

• Start with three ordinary or expected arrivals, and at least two that are a surprise.

• List about seven examples of the quality.

Reflection: When might a catalog be more powerful than an argument or explanation for making a reader feel something’s scope or inevitability?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Open Word

🎯 Goal: Write a poem. Engage the reader with a feeling of gathering or accumulation.

🚧 Constraints:

• Your chosen word must open every new clause. Alternately, use “and” + [word].

• Do not resolve the logical structure. The poem is all subordination, no resolution.

• Write until the last phrase feels final despite the open structure

Reflection: What happened to the poem’s rhythm as the repetitions accumulated? Did the word start to change meaning or feeling across its repetitions?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Retraction

🎯 Goal: Write a poem. Immerse the reader in the narrator’s perspective as they think on the page, reaching for a comparison, finding it inadequate, and reaching again.

🚧 Constraints:

• Write at least two metaphors for the subject.

• Introduce each metaphor with a phrase that cancels what came before.

• Stop when you find a satisfying metaphor.

Modification: To increase difficulty, add a third or fourth retraction and replacement without triggering impatience.

Reflection: What made the second metaphor feel more accurate than the first? Was it the metaphor itself, or was it the act of rejecting the first one that gave the second more authority?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Step-Down

🎯 Goal: Write a poem. Convert the reader with an ending that feels more honest, using a shift down in register.

🚧 Constraints:

• Maintain a consistently elevated register. No colloquial language, no mundane details, no humor.

• The final few lines must break the register: use plain language, a physical detail, a slightly awkward image, or snippet of conversation.

• Stop after the shift.

Modification: If you find writing the lyrical language difficult, try writing a step up: start with down to earth language and rise only at the end.

Reflection: In prose (fiction, essays, speeches) when might a step-down closing beat work better than ending at the peak?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Proxy

🎯 Goal: Write a poem. Create an image that resonates with a human emotion or human experience without the ever mentioning a human or humanity.

🚧 Constraints:

• No human characters or implied human perspective.

• Every line must describe what the subject does, not what it means, but can let the subject’s state bleed into reality.

• Write until the process or actions are complete.

Reflection: What’s the difference between a poem that uses an animal as a metaphor and a poem that uses an animal as a proxy? When would you choose one over the other?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Absence Poem

🎯 Goal: Write a poem. Make the reader feel the intensity of the moment by showing them what falls away.

🚧 Constraints:

• Every line must name something that is absent, irrelevant, gone, or forgotten in this moment.

• The list must escalate: begin with small, expected absences and end with something the reader wouldn’t expect to disappear.

• Write until there’s nowhere else to go.

Reflection: Did the escalation create a sense of the moment’s power, or did it feel like a list? What determined whether each new absence added emotional force?

» Streak Saver Exercise: The Window Seat

🎯 Goal: Write a poem. Immerse the reader by making them feel the distance between the speaker and the observed scene, letting that distance itself carry emotional weight.

🚧 Constraints:

• The first line must establish where the speaker is for the entire poem.

• The poem alternates: one line about what the speaker sees outside, then one line about something in the speaker’s immediate physical space.

• End when the focus of observation moves on, or the narrator is about to move.

Modification: To increase complexity, add physical gestures that heighten the narrator’s distance from the observed subject.

Reflection: Did the alternation between exterior observation and interior detail create a rhythm? What did the juxtaposition produce? Contrast, longing, irony, something else?

Leave a comment

I often focus on reducing cognitive load as a way to keep the writing process manageable. Cognitive overload can lead to anxiety and doubt, and this might discourage the writer from keeping their writing streak alive. An article by George Saunders reminds me it’s also useful to practice sitting in the discomfort of not knowing where the writing is going. This ability to sit with discomfort is also a skill writers need to practice.

I know people who have given up on meditation after their first sit because their mind was racing or their bones ached, and of course, that is the point of meditation at that stage, to sit with discomfort and observe the scattered thoughts that arise. So too with writing. The path is rarely straightforward or comfortable, and in our effort to optimize we can overlook the productive power of doubt and uncertainty.

An over-optimized process is over-determined. Going back to meditation, it’s possible to clear the mind and detach from all feelings of discomfort, but this state of tranquility often leads to dullness, not insight. For the writer, an over-optimized state of flow can lead to dullness as they write. They need a slight tickle of curiosity to keep their attention from sinking too deep.

To stop that from happening we can follow Saunders’ advice and engage in creative destabilization. Throw a wrench in the gears of the story and struggle to recover.

The reader’s experience of the finished text and the writer’s first pass are two sides of the same page. The writer cannot simulate spontaneity. Consider a simple game of hopscotch. The moves are predetermined—and may be fun—but they lack the random joy of a child tugging against her father’s hand as she tries to step inside the pattern of cracks in the sidewalk they are walking across. The game of hopscotch, as an artifact of culture, arose from the child’s instinct to dance within the lines, but it is bounded by rules, repeated, and perfected. Natural movements bubble up, shape an experience, and then are swept away by the child’s fatigue or a father’s call to “keep up.”

A reader will know the difference between a text that was performed rather than discovered. If the writer feels lost, the reader too will feel lost in the story. Then they will delight when it all comes together.

“That lostness is felt, by the reader, as openness, and as connection—reader and writer become fellow-travelers in the unfolding adventure of the story.”

— George Saunders

Story Club with George Saunders

What's Up With All the Theme Parks?

Writing this early Wednesday morning from Austin, where I had a fun event last night with Judy Maggio, Texas broadcasting legend - thank you, Judy. I’m on to Houston today, then Dallas on Thursday, San Diego on Friday - and home, tour done…

Read more

3 months ago · 227 likes · 82 comments · George Saunders

In his article, Saunders cautions against the “faux-Hemingway voice” we writers try to adopt. This voice is shaped by our own ego. This is like trying to mimic the voice of a meditation master as a step on the path to enlightenment—take long pauses, kick off with the word, “so,” and speak in a deep, sleep-inducing monotone.

As writers, if we lean heavily on predetermined structures or plot beats, we will slip into this all-knowing, overly serious, authoritative voice. It works in the right context, but lacks the openness and genuine connection that arises from getting lost and beating a path back home. When I first started using GPS, I realized I was losing my ability to navigate on my own, so I started going out on Sunday drives, getting lost, and letting myself trust the GPS could get me home if my sense of direction couldn’t. And it worked. The more I did this, the better I got at navigating the streets around me. That is how art should work.

Creative destabilization does introduce the danger of overtaxing the mind of the writer-as-navigator as they struggle to find their way down unfamiliar streets. Learning to tolerate discomfort is a skill that needs to be practiced, but it pays off in dividends because it makes learning every other skill more tolerable.

But that tolerance is also a sign to push a little further into the discomfort.

Saunders wrote about rundown theme parks, and he found that worked as a tool to destabilize his writing—although, maybe not so much anymore. Readers of Haruki Murakami might notice how often he puts his characters in wells. Why? The writer doesn’t need to know what these elements mean before starting to write. It will come out in the draft or in the edit, and even if the connection is never found, the reader will supply their own interpretation of your grand narrative. That’s the power of the narrative human brain which is always looking for connections.

The writer can then say, “Yes, of course, that’s precisely what I meant.”

I could give you a checklist of the five key takeaways—I have one all written up and ready to go—but the master’s final lesson is to transcend all checklists. Doubt is the engine, not technique. Don’t let technique stabilize. We have to trick ourselves out of writing with too much competence if we want to write stronger stories.

Go read Saunders’ original article that I linked above. If you’re willing to feel a bit uncomfortable, try this approach with your own writing. Here’s an exercise that asks you to sit with a touch of absurdity.

» Streak Saver Exercise: Normalizing the Abnormal

🎯 Goal: Engage the reader with a heightened sense of something that is off-kilter through the character’s lack of reaction.

🚧 Constraints:

• The character never acknowledges the strangeness, treating it as routine.

• Use the character’s everyday concerns as the foreground.

• Write until the character leaves, or the odd element departs.

🪞 Reflection: Did you find yourself trying to explain the strangeness? How does the contrast between the ordinary and the strange affect the tone?

This week we celebrated Groundhog Day in the US. I streamed “reaction videos” because I’m a mindless slave to the algorithm. Random YouTubers were watching the movie Groundhog Day to get a boost from the holiday tie-in, and I pulled up to the slop trough to consume each react video the algorithm suggested. It was Groundhog Day all over again.

While watching reactions to the movie I noticed something odd. Viewers loved the character arc—it was 10/10. And yet, I couldn’t remember many details about the backstory. So I watched again, listening for any facts that described Bill Murray’s character. Who is Phil Connors? Here is everything we know. He’s a weatherman from Pittsburgh. His sister once dated Ned (now an insurance salesman) until Phil chased him off. And, that’s it. That is Phil’s backstory in the movie. He has no past trauma to process. He doesn’t talk about feelings. We don’t know if his mother abandoned him as a child. When Rita, his love interest, asks Phil about himself, he deflects. His most honest moment comes when he says, “I don’t even like myself.”

This runs counter to so much advice we’re given as writers. We’re told that character is about psychology, trauma, and backstory. We’re instructed to flesh out the biographic data before we start to write.

And yet, we all know who Phil is at the start of the movie, a dollop of Bill Murray’s charm mixed in with the arrogance of his big city character. There’s a lot of agreement about his character in the react videos: rude, prima donna, narcissist, mean, tiresome, and toxic (but also likable and snarky). Phil says things so self-centered and egotistical the audience cheers when he’s smacked in the head by a snow shovel. Everyone agrees he deserves a bite of cosmic karma.

So if backstory is lacking, how do we learn about Phil’s character and chart his transformation?

• Actions: (1) In our first glimpse of Phil he stands in front of an empty blue screen blowing a CGI snowstorm away. (2) Later, he kidnaps a woodchuck and lets it drive a truck off a cliff, and (3) by the end of the movie he’s changing flat tires and performing jazz on stage.

• Inaction: (1) Early in the movie Phil turns down an invitation to dinner. (2) Later after the time loop starts he walks away from the broadcast. (3) By the end he stops trying to impress Rita.

• Interactions: (1) Phil makes fun of Rita’s groundhog impression and belittles the camera man. (2) Later in the movie, he pretends to be Rita’s perfect man by mirroring her preferences. (3) By the end he’s embracing Ned Ryerson and treating the most annoying man in the town—an insurance salesman—as a friend.

• Reactions: (1) Phil reacts to the people around him with disdain, referring to the people of Punxsutawny as hicks and morons. (2) Later he reacts to them as NPCs in his god-mode game. (3) And finally, not only does he react to the townspeople as friends, they react to him as the most popular man in town.

This last piece is important. Reactions are the essence of a story. Rita doesn’t just base her knowledge of Phil based on her interactions with him. In one of the loops, Phil gives her a perfect day, but she still sees through his act. His actions alone are not enough evidence to overcome his past bad impressions. In the final loop, it’s the townspeople and their reactions that convince Rita that Phil is a good man. Then, the audience themselves use Rita’s reaction to Phil as their measure of his worth—$339.88, the price she pays for him at the charity auction.

Once Rita fully embraces the man Phil has become, the audience is ready for the time loop (and the movie) to end. When it seems like he’s still stuck in the loop, the audience groans and complains. Then they realize the curse is broken and the cheers start.

Consider this. Why was I even watching random YouTubers react to a movie I’ve seen many times before? Part of the reason is my instinct as a writer. React videos are a goldmine of data about audiences and how they experience a story. But that’s more of an excuse. At a basic level, I like to watch people react to other people. It’s a social instinct. I learn what it means to be a good man by watching how people react to the many versions of Phil Connors.

As a quick contrast, this week I also watched reactions to Star Trek Picard, a show that is on my Do Not Watch list. There’s a scene in season two where the character Raffi says, “What I’m feeling right now is intense shock.” I had to pause and replay that line a couple times because I could not believe I heard the line right. Her friend has just died, and she blames Picard. Her response is to talk about her feelings. The audience's reaction to this dialogue is just as confused as my own reaction. A person in shock does not angrily articulate their feelings. In the scene the character looks and sounds angry. She talks about her feelings. But her reaction doesn’t feel authentic. It feels performative.

Describing what a character feels doesn’t cause an audience to feel. Audiences don’t experience the character’s emotions just like we don’t think each other’s thoughts. Empathy is not a direct link. We recognize emotion through external signs and construct our own emotional response, and because emotional signals can be manipulative or unproductive, we have evolved sophisticated mechanisms that detect a lack of authenticity or create distance. Even the online “reactors” get accused of faking their own reactions.

The lesson for the writer isn’t to drop backstory or ignore motivation entirely. What Groundhog Day shows us is the possibility to write a strong character arc and reveal who a character is using only their actions in the story. If you get a chance, go watch a reaction video and take note of what makes the audience respond.

» Streak Saver Exercise: Revealing Character Through Inaction

🎯 Goal: Engage the reader by crafting a character-sized puzzle that leaves them wondering, why didn’t they do anything?

🚧 Constraints:

• Write only what the character observes.

• No internal justification for their choice.

• End when the moment passes.

🪞 Reflection: Would the reader judge this character differently if the stakes were higher or lower? How does inaction create a different impression than action?

There’s a Latin phrase, a favorite of writers: Nulla dies sine linea. It means, “No day without a line.” It was quoted from a visual artist, but it translates to writing as well. Yes, it’s good to have a daily writing habit, and having a simple low-barrier threshold like “a single line” makes the habit more sustainable. But there’s another great reason to write a single line each day.

Sentences are actually kind of interesting.

I noticed this when I started reading Robert Bresson’s book Notes on the Cinematograph.

Images and sounds like people who make acquaintance on a journey and afterward cannot separate.

The book is sparse. Each entry a single sentence or, at most, a paragraph. They feel like notes jotted into a notebook, because they were just that. Bresson collected these notes into a book, but kept the breathless brevity. Because of this form, the reader treats each sentence like a puzzle to be deciphered. The pattern is: peruse, pause, and ponder.

When I write, I often find myself connecting ideas in a way that leaves the sentence formless, like a tube sock stuffed with billiard balls. My sentence flops onto the page. A good sentence is fit to purpose. Its form follows function. And that brings us to another good reason to write a daily sentence.

We can write a line a day as a way to learn the diverse forms of the line.

Our brains are full of interesting sentence structures each with their own function, but most of us haven’t learned to produce these sentences when we write. We’re focused on capturing the idea with words, we overlook the sentence as a unit of discourse. I rarely see this diversity explained by other authors. In his book, Consider This, Chuck Palahniuk suggests adding instructions and exclamations to writing alongside description. Good advice, but it doesn’t go far enough.

Consider this example from Alex Hillman’s book Tiny MBA.

An inability to cope with boredom kills more successes than any kind of competition.

Wow! That is page 37 of the book in its entirety, and it says everything needed. If Hillman had written more, it would have diluted the idea. But the sentence stands on its own and causes a reaction in the reader to pause, perhaps even debate. Am I too worried about competition? How does my own restlessness cause failure? Do I sabotage myself by focusing on the fun, sexy stuff that everyone else is doing? The sentence acts as a truth bomb. The statement feels true at the outset, yet has such a vague interpretation, the reader must stop to ruminate.

Compare that to a transition like, “From here, the argument takes a stranger turn.” This sentence holds a door open and invites the reader to pass through from one passage to another.

Notice I’m not talking about the grammatical structure of the sentence, like the periodic or the cumulative sentence. Writers have written entire books celebrating the cumulative sentence. We’re looking how a sentence functions in the text and how it affects the reader. Structure is part of that, but not all of it.

If writers unpacked their brains, they could probably find hundreds of forms sentences can take, each fit to a different purpose. And we can likely invent hundreds more. That’s why I’m posting a line a day to a few different places, and I’m inviting you to join me in this exploration of the single line.

• Writing Streak/Notes on Substack: Follow this newsletter and watch for my daily notes.

• Mastodon #lineaday: Post using the #lineaday tag to group posts together.

• r/lineaday on Reddit: Visit the subreddit as a place to post and discuss individual sentences.

But wait, there’s more.

In preparation for this project I’ve researched what makes a good line, and found examples of great lines from literature. I’ve also studied frameworks like George Gopen’s reader expectation model, and Bill Schley’s micro-scripts. So far I’ve come up with a list of 20 types of sentences you can use as a buffet to pick from when you want to write a line and study the form.

• 5 Epistemological Sentences

  • A question: Pose a question, even if you know the answer

  • Truth bomb: Write a short, significant message that feels profound

  • A rule: Create a concise rule or aphorism for a specific domain

  • Overextension: Take a well-known phrase and add an unexpected extension to it

  • The jotted down note: Write a sentence that feels hastily written but potent

• 5 Storytelling Sentences

  • First line/final line: Write a single line that could compellingly start or end a story

  • A story in a line: Compress an entire story, scene, or character arc into one sentence

  • The pitch: Create a one-sentence slogan or pitch for a book, movie, or product

  • The punchline: Write a clever caption for an imaginary image

  • Transition: Construct a sentence that bridges two unseen passages

• 5 Stylistic Sentences

  • Wordplay: Create a pun, joke, or other clever play on words

  • Aesthetic text: Focus on the sound and structure of the line using poetic or rhetorical tricks

  • Creative constraint: Write a line that must follow a specific, unusual rule (e.g., only monosyllables)

  • Pure nonsense: Write a tongue-twister or a sentence that is interesting without making logical sense

  • Synthetic synesthesia: Write a line that fuses together two senses

• 5 Conceptual Sentences

  • Definition: Redefine a common word or invent a new one to reveal a hidden truth

  • Imperative instruction: Write a command or an instruction to the reader

  • Defamiliarization: Describe a common object or concept as if seeing it for the first time

  • Fill-in-the-blank: Create a sentence with blanks for the reader to fill in

  • Author model: Craft a sentence in imitation of a recognizable writer’s style

See the full list with more detailed descriptions and examples on Reddit.

Until then, I’ll sign off with a favorite line from Peter Falk in Wings of Desire.

You take a pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line, and together it’s a good line.

A while back I worked in an equipment room passing out devices to other employees. The job had busy periods, but during slumps there was nothing to do. I was stuck at my post behind a walk-up window waiting for people to bring me work. I hated being idle. For every moment that I had nothing to do, pressure would build. It felt unnatural to be doing nothing, so any bit of work was a relief.

When it comes to my writing, the script gets flipped. Idleness becomes the default. Work becomes the pressure point. I find relief through procrastination. I bounce. I think about writing instead of writing. I plan a new project. I tweak my process in absentia. Does that sound familiar? You, too?

As social creatures, we excel when working in systems. We’ll hit the gas hard for eight hours straight. We’ll optimize the shit out of our processes. We flex in front of our coworkers. But it can all fall apart the moment we clock out for the day ala Fred Flintstone.

Why is it easy to push through resistance at work, but being our own boss feels hard? That’s totally opposite what it should be. Isn’t passion supposed to motivate us?

⋙ The Great Institutional Training Program

We can start to pick this apart by looking at Karl Newell’s Theory of Constraints. Newell’s studies of psychology and movement explore the factors that lead to behavior. It explains why we see some potential actions but not others. Our opportunities to act are determined by interactions between three types of constraints.

1. Individual constraints: personal traits, skills, motivations, emotions, knowledge, fatigue, and physical attributes.

2. Environmental constraints: physical surroundings, social norms, organizational rules, accountability structures, the calendar on your desk.

3. Task constraints: the goals, rules, and specific requirements of the task at hand.

Now think about your environment from childhood throughout school and into your career. Did your parents set your schedule? Dinner time, time to do homework, bath time, bedtime, and maybe even set times to pray. School followed a typed-out syllabus that determined what you would learn and when. And then the workplace took over your institutional indoctrination. Clock in, stay on task, finish your lunch, get back to work, clock out, and don’t linger. For decades we were externally regulated, following a 20-year program weighted towards strict environment and task constraints.

Family, school, and work dictated life. As individuals in this system we learn to fit a role and respond to external motivation. We rarely learn internal regulation skills that work when the environment and task constraints are a bit more open and ambiguous. We became world-class passengers, but now the plane is dropping fast and we’re trying to learn to fly.

At the office, constraints dominate behavior and we thrive despite our dispassion for whatever nut we’re made to crack. At home, every option is available. The environmental and task constraints are open wide, like a fridge full of snacks, and your individual constraints are now looming large.

That’s why writing at your desk alone feels so different from showing up to a shift. The system isn’t doing the heavy lifting anymore. You have to.

Every difficult feeling becomes a valid reason to stop. Your discomfort becomes evidence that you’re working on the wrong task. And once you’ve stopped you divert your attention and launch into an unproductive task. Even though you’re following your passion, that passion will dredge up difficult feelings. That resistance you feel needs a countervailing force to push you forward.

⋙ The Missing Manual for Self-Direction

Institutions teach us a lot, but systemically it’s hard for them to teach us self-reliance, drive, grit, gumption, or stick-to-itiveness. We can't really blame the institutions, either. One system can’t teach another system—an individual—how to pursue their own goals. The individual needs to tackle that problem on their own.

So, how do successful self-employed writers use constraints to finish their passion project?

• They rewire their brains to become more proactive.

• They rearrange their homes to make writing easy, and time-sinks harder.

• They reengineer their goals, set milestones, and define clear tasks.

They do all that crud we know we should be doing, right? But there’s still another trick to understand. Putting these conditions in place and sustaining them are actions themselves, and those actions have their own required constraints. I can buy a calendar and I can add events to that calendar, but it means nothing if I don’t check the calendar daily.

It keeps coming back to the individual. When pursuing individual goals, the ball is always in your court. Change yourself, change your goals, and change your environment little by little until it becomes the life you want.

But to do that you must meet yourself where you are right now. Make plans for the person you are based on your capabilities.

⋙ The Writing Streak Ladder

Let’s end here with a list of common failures that will sink a writing streak. Are you stuck somewhere on this ladder?

1. Absorbed in daily activities, you don’t think about writing

2. You remember to write, but keep dismissing the idea

3. You start writing sessions, but don't finish what you started

4. You finish writing sessions, but don't generate usable material

5. You write usable material, but don't complete projects

6. You complete projects, but don't publish your writing

Each rung on this ladder isn’t just a practical problem, it’s the outcome of an emotional constraint. Forgetting, dismissing, avoiding, doubting, each emotion trips you up in new ways. If you’re on rung two of the ladder where you remember to write, but keep dismissing it, maybe don’t plan a novel. Plan to write one paragraph. At that level, success matters more than ambition.

So where exactly are you falling short? Still building a habit? Struggling to shape your writing into a narrative? Are you jumping from one idea to another? Wherever you are, there's a good chance that the tools and skills you've been using to succeed in other contexts aren't working anymore. And because of this you might have lost faith in your own agency.

But there's good news. The tools and skills learned from family, school, and work are still useful. They just need to be converted to work off-grid.

Here I could list off possible solutions for each of the problems above, but you're not stupid. You possess the ingenuity to sort this out. You've just been trained to rely on external systems to push through resistance, measure your performance, and set your daily tasks.

What’s it going to take? You can hook back into social systems to help build the pressure you need. Or, shape your environment and tasks to reinforce action instead of passivity. Either way, don't forget your individual constraints matter. They matter the most now that you are in charge of chasing your own passion.

Remember how at work idleness feels like pressure, and getting assigned a task can be a relief. At home, we want to build that same kind of pressure. Otherwise, the work itself feels heavy. The challenge isn’t generating more passion. You have plenty of that. It’s building a system, one step at a time, to make your own work feel as natural as clocking in once did.

This Week’s Streak Saver 🪦

As much as it sucks to be on your own, people do love to read about individuals persevering despite the odds. So, this week we’ll take a character out of their comfort zone.

⋙ System Breakdown

Goal: Create engagement by showing the character’s struggle to accomplish a task made hard by isolation.

Constraints:

• The character knows how to do the task but keeps hitting problems

• Include their reaction as monologue

• Stop when the character either perseveres or gives up

Reflection: How did isolation change the character's behavior? Would they have felt differently about the situation if they weren’t alone?

Popularity is perplexing. In the world of publishing, there’s a great paradox. One author writes an objectively "good book" that is hailed as an artistic tour de force. Their lyrical prose employs an impressive vocabulary and a plethora of French phrases written in italics. The deeply moving story unearths signs of hope in the midst of tragedy. Yet, sales are dismal. The author wallows hopelessly amidst their own tragedy.

They are especially irked when they read about another author profiled in their local newspaper. She wrote a vampire novel for sexually repressed librarians. This book went viral. Is it a conspiracy? Perhaps a secret consortium of librarians slipped copies of the book into the hands of patrons while intoning a Latin phrase.

The truth of the matter is this: Quality alone does not succeed. While good writing can be part of the reason a book takes off, ultimately a book is a social artifact. Breakout books don’t just tell a good story, they play a social game.

⋙ Attack the Periphery

We can find the recipe for writing a breakout success by studying Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Yes, I’m saying that writing is a lot like grappling with a sweaty, muscled body and tackling it to the ground. The BJJ coach Greg Souders describes the sport as a game of immobilization, but how does an athlete achieve this?

We attack the periphery to get access to the center mass.

— Greg Souders

In Jiu-Jitsu the periphery means the arms, legs, and head. The body, shoulders, and hips, that’s the center mass. You don’t tackle your opponent like a linebacker. Take hold of their hands and feet, and work your way closer and closer to the body.

That’s the trick. Don’t target everyone in the room that you want to impress, that’s a direct attack on the center mass. Instead, target the edges where the intimate conversations start, the periphery. Social systems are structured around communication, and books spread through conversations—not because a self-selected cadre of gatekeepers approve. Remember a couple years ago when Wired magazine profiled Brandon Sanderson? The editor was befuddled by Sanderson’s success, flipping through the pages of his novels searching for the best examples of bad prose. (Personally, I get thrown off every time Sanderson mentions “booted feet”.) That article missed the point, the fans and evangelists.

Meritocracy misses how culture survives and thrives. Infinite Jest isn’t so well known because it meets an ideal of perfect prose. Most copies stand on shelves unread and unknockdownable. The book is celebrated because it is so complex and impenetrable it has risen to the heights of Mount Everest as an Instagram destination—a dinner party anecdote. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book… I hear it’s a good book.

Cultural impact starts with the niches. Whatever audience you’re writing for, don’t sashay into the center of the dance floor. Instead charm one reader who catches your eye and invite them to tango.

⋙ The Identity Game

A truly good book becomes part of a reader’s identity. Not every reader, but the select few for whom it scratches an itch.

• The book filters for the right audience

• It captures their attention so they finish reading

• Then it can convert them into fans or evangelists

Filter, capture, and convert. This is how a story starts a conversation.

The cover, the blurb, the first sentence, and opening chapters give readers a signal that says, “This book was written for you.” If it transforms that reader into an evangelist, that’s when the buzz begins. While a fan will identify with a book and build bridges with other fans, the evangelist has a fundamental needful craving to create more fans. They want to see other people experience the transformation they themselves underwent. They are the people who watch react videos.

That peripheral audience is the gateway the book needs to target. Those readers become the access point that leads to the central mass. A fully converted audience evangelizes the book, generates momentum, and tips the book further toward the mainstream.

E.L. James wrote for a specific weird niche, not the mainstream audience that purchased 150 million copies of her book. By the time the movie adaptations were made, devout religious housewives were sneaking into theaters to watch their first R-rated movie. Shock! That niche created social energy that propelled the book into the mainstream, and even allowed the story to ripple back out to new peripheries.

Not convinced, yet? Did you ever hear the fate of the movie, The Room? That movie became popular not in spite of being bad, but because it was so bad. It became a cultural phenomenon through the efforts of a niche audience celebrating their own ironic appreciation. The movie’s success was about a community it built, not its quality.

Most writers aim for the center of their target: the mainstream, a genre, or even a specific subgenre that captivates them. This rarely works. Whatever the target, shoot for the edges, not the bullseye.

Writers become breakout authors because they delighted a small group of early adopters who went on to recommend and defend the book to the world. That’s why a specific premise will outperform a more generic one. Good books don’t stand on merit alone—they stand out in the crowd.

Stories connect people. If books didn’t perform that social function, they wouldn’t exist. Literature as a social system would die out.

⋙ Write to Delight

So what’s the action here? Don’t worry about some isolated measure of good or bad writing. The real game being played is social. Write for living, breathing readers and give them something to talk about.

• Who will stay up until 3 AM reading your book?

• Where can you find them online (or off)?

• Which stories do they already love?

• What gap can you fill?

• How can you get them talking?

Make that specific reader feel seen and they will text three friends, and those friends will turn the book into a movement precisely because you didn't water down your vision and instead crafted something finely tuned to their particular tingles. Do that, and your initial enamored audience will become your book’s champions.

Start at the periphery. Lock it down. The core will follow.

This Week’s Streak Saver 🪦

Now that you’ve read all about the social game, let’s practice targeting readers. But not your readers. What fun would that be? Instead, let’s target your haters.

⋙ The Anti-Blurb

Goal: Practice filtering by slyly repelling the readers who would hate your book.

Constraints:

• Include clear warnings about what the book isn't

• Focus on the specific experience the reader will hate

• Stop when you think you’ve definitely lost them

Reflection (after writing): What readers did you deliberately discourage? Do you think this blurb would also select for the right readers?

The most memorable moments in your favorite books aren't just beautifully written—they're strategically constructed like a card castle. This week we’re focusing on meaning in imagery and how it changes when different subjects are placed side by side.

Think about it—a teddy bear hits differently when it's sitting on a child's bed versus abandoned in a rain-soaked alley. That's not just description; that's juxtaposition doing the heavy lifting. When we create imagery, we're not just painting pretty pictures with words. We're making choices about what deserves the reader’s attention and how those elements interact to create meaning beyond their individual parts.

So grab your pen and let's get messy with some deliberate image-making.

This Week’s Streak Savers 🪦

⋙ Monday, Mar 24: Object Layers

Goal: Create layered imagery that builds reader immersion by revealing an object through a progressive narrowing focus.

Constraints:

• First, describe the general class or category of objects

• Next, describe the specific object

• Finally, focus on one particular feature or function that makes this object meaningful

Reflection: How did narrowing your focus change the emotional weight of the object?

⋙ Tuesday, Mar 25: Unfamiliar Discovery

Goal: Create reader curiosity through defamiliarization, making a common object feel strange and new.

Constraints:

• Write in first person perspective

• Show the character figuring out how to hold or interact with the object

• End the scene when the character discovers the object's true function

Reflection: What details most effectively created the sense of discovery?

⋙ Wednesday, Mar 26: Objects in Contrast

Goal: Create a meaningful moment through juxtaposition that reveals character and invites reader insight.

Constraints:

• Choose one distinctive tool/object from each character's profession

• Write a scene where these objects end up physically near each other

• Show one character noticing and reflecting on the contrast between the items

Reflection: How did the juxtaposition reveal something about both characters that description alone could not?

⋙ Thursday, Mar 27: Same but Different

Goal: Create depth through contrasting perspectives, showing how meaning is shaped by personal experience.

Constraints:

• Have the first character describe their object and its significance

• Show their reaction when they discover the second character has the same item

• Reveal how differently the second character views or uses their identical object

Reflection: What techniques most effectively highlighted the difference in perspective?

⋙ Friday, Mar 28: The Density of Surprise

Goal: Control reader attention through information density, creating emphasis on the unexpected.

Constraints:

• Establish the setting in one brief sentence

• Describe the expected object in 1-2 short sentences

• Write the description of the surprising object in a full paragraph, using sensory details

Reflection: How did varying the length and detail of your descriptions affect the impact of the surprising element?

⋙ Saturday, Mar 29: Unexpected Connection

Goal: Create reader intrigue by subverting expectations about a character through their interaction with an object.

Constraints:

• Briefly establish the character and setting, creating clear expectations

• Describe the moment the character encounters an object that seems misaligned with their identity

• Focus on their surprising familiarity (or unfamiliarity) with the object, revealing something unexpected

Modification: Subvert expectations by having the character be unfamiliar with an object they should know well.

Reflection: How did the subverted expectation deepen the reader's understanding of the character?

⋙ Sunday, Mar 30: Character Mirrors

Goal: Create a vivid character study through contrasting or parallel imagery, revealing deeper character truths through visual elements.

Constraints:

• Begin with descriptions of each character's appearance and mannerisms

• Focus on significant objects each character unpacks or arranges

• Show each character performing a routine action in their personal style

• End with a moment that reveals an unexpected similarity or difference

Reflection: How did physical imagery and object choices reveal character without explicit statements?

3 Alternate Exercises

⋙ Through Foreign Eyes

Goal: Use defamiliarization to create fresh imagery of ordinary settings or objects.

Constraints:

• Describe three everyday objects using comparisons to things from the character's own culture

• Avoid naming the objects directly

• Focus on how these items might be misunderstood or reinterpreted

Reflection: How did shifting perspective transform ordinary objects into something new?

⋙ Crossed Wires

Goal: Use contrasting descriptions to reveal character while creating a vivid shared image.

Constraints:

• Choose an ambiguous scene that could have multiple interpretations

• Write alternating paragraphs from each character's perspective

• Include sensory details that reflect each character's background or expertise

• End with a moment where they realize they're seeing the same thing differently

Reflection: Which sensory details most effectively highlighted their different interpretations?

⋙ Symbolic Transition

Goal: Use changing imagery to illustrate character development through object interaction.

Constraints:

• Begin with the character interacting with an object in their typical way

• Introduce an event that changes the character's perspective or status

• Return to the same object, now described with different imagery and associations

Reflection: What specific imagery shifts most effectively communicated this character’s transformation?

Leave a comment

Photographers and painters make deliberate choices about how to arrange elements within their frame. Writers, too, can construct scenes that guide the reader's eye and attention. This week, we explore techniques of composition and framing in literary imagery—tools that transform ordinary description into meaningful visual experiences.

Good composition in writing ain’t accidental. It's the result of conscious decisions about what to include, what to exclude, and how to direct the reader's focus. When we frame a scene effectively, we create emphasis, establish relationships between elements, and build layers of meaning.

Let’s expand your descriptive toolkit and develop a more sophisticated approach to the visual architecture of your fiction.

This Week’s Streak Savers 🪦

⋙ Monday, Mar 17: Balance and Framing

Goal: Create a sense of balanced composition using a chiastic (ABBA) structure that frames the narrative.

Constraints:

• Begin with the setting, then narrow focus to the object

• Include dialogue where characters discuss the object

• End by returning to the object, then widening back to the setting

Reflection: What changed between your first and last description of the setting?

⋙ Tuesday, Mar 18: Physical Framing

Goal: Create focused imagery by using a physical frame to highlight certain elements while deliberately excluding others.

Constraints:

• Begin by describing the frame itself

• Describe only what is visible within the frame

• End with the character briefly speculating about what lies beyond the frame

Reflection: How might changing the frame alter the scene's meaning?

⋙ Wednesday, Mar 19: Cropping for Focus

Goal: Demonstrate how cropping elements changes a scene's focus and impact, similar to cropping a photograph.

Constraints:

• Write a complete scene including character, setting, and object

• Choose one element to "crop out" (setting, character actions, or object details)

• Rewrite the scene without the cropped element, adjusting to maintain coherence

• Keep both versions roughly the same length

Reflection: Which version created a stronger emotional response?

⋙ Thursday, Mar 20: Creating a Focal Point

Goal: Establishing a clear focal point that draws the reader's attention.

Constraints:

• Begin by describing the setting without mentioning the focal point

• Introduce the out-of-place element, then briefly shift attention elsewhere

• Return to the focal point, describing specific details that make it stand out

Reflection: How did the contrast between setting and focal point create visual interest? What techniques helped direct the reader's attention?

⋙ Friday, Mar 21: Creating Depth

Goal: Create a sense of depth by tracking movement across different distances, focusing on how details change with proximity.

Constraints:

• Begin with the subject at its starting position (near or far)

• Describe it passing through a middle distance, noting changing details

• End with its final position, emphasizing details visible only at this distance

Modification: Instead of a stationary viewpoint, describe a static location from a moving perspective.

Reflection: How did your descriptive focus change as the distance shifted?

⋙ Saturday, Mar 22: Unusual Perspective

Goal: Create visual interest by describing familiar elements from an unexpected perspective.

Constraints:

• Never directly state what the viewpoint position is

• Include specific details that subtly suggest the unusual angle

• End with a line of dialogue that reveals or confirms the viewpoint's position

Reflection: What techniques helped readers orient themselves without explicit explanation?

⋙ Sunday, Mar 23: Framed Narrative Composition

Goal: Create a complete visual composition that integrates multiple techniques from the week (framing, focal point, depth, and perspective).

Constraints:

• Begin with a clear framing device to enter the inner narrative

• Include a focal point that holds significance both inside and outside the frame

• Show the focal point from at least two different perspectives or distances

• Exit through the same framing device, creating structural balance

Reflection: Which technique proved most effective for your particular narrative?

3 Alternate Exercises

⋙ Negative Space

Goal: Create emphasis through absence by focusing on the negative space around a missing element.

Constraints:

• Begin by establishing what should be present but isn't

• Describe the surrounding elements that highlight the absence

• End with a subtle emotional reaction to the absence

Reflection: How did focusing on what's missing create a stronger impression than describing what's present?

⋙ Foreground and Background

Goal: Create layered imagery by managing foreground and background elements, controlling where the reader's attention goes.

Constraints:

• Begin with clear foreground focus on a character's immediate task or object

• Gradually introduce background elements without shifting main focus

• Include one moment where background briefly becomes more important

• Return to foreground with subtle changes influenced by background events

• Complete in one page

Reflection: How did balancing foreground and background elements create depth in your scene? What techniques helped maintain focus while still acknowledging the background action?

⋙ Nested Framing

Setup: A character observes something through multiple layers of framing (e.g., through a window, then a doorway, then a mirror).

Goal: Create depth and focus through successive layers of framing that direct attention inward.

Constraints:

• Begin with the outermost frame and move inward through at least three layers

• At each layer, narrow the focus and increase the detail

• At the innermost layer, reveal something unexpected or significant

• Use no more than three sentences per layer

• Complete in one page

Reflection: How did each layer of framing change the reader's expectations? How might changing the order of frames alter the impact of the final revelation?

Engage the senses! This is what we’re told, but our descriptions can become flat when we rely on the same paper-thin imagery. This week, we'll dive into the physical properties that shape our world—light, color, temperature, gravity, motion, and materiality—to create imagery that doesn't just describe places and things, but makes them tangible and weighty.

These exercises challenge you to use the world’s most sophisticated physics simulator, your mind. Can you recall and recreate how physical forces and properties manifest in our world? By focusing on these fundamental aspects of reality, you'll develop imagery that feels authentic and immediate, creating a more immersive experience for your reader.

Whether you're writing speculative worlds or contemporary settings, mastering the imagery of physical phenomena will transform your descriptive passages from mere background into active, engaging elements of your storytelling.

This Week’s Streak Savers 🪦

⋙ Monday, Mar 10: Light in the Darkness

Goal: Create immersive imagery that captures how light transforms a space and affects perception.

Constraints:

• Begin with either darkness or light as the initial state

• Include the moment when light switches on/off (through any means)

• End when the character's eyes have adjusted to the new state

Reflection: How would the emotional impact change if the character had been expecting/not expecting this light change?

⋙ Tuesday, Mar 11: Living Canvas

Goal: Create vivid imagery through deliberate color choices that evoke mood and atmosphere in a scene.

Constraints:

• Name a few specific colors in the artist's palette (evocative names like "cobalt" or "cerulean")

• Transition from the artist's perspective to being inside the painting itself

• Use each named color at least once to describe elements within the painted world

Reflection: How did your specific color choices influence the emotional tone of the scene?

⋙ Wednesday, Mar 12: Temperature Escape

Goal: Create sensory immersion through physical descriptions that make readers feel the temperature without directly stating it.

Constraints:

• Avoid directly naming feeling words like "hot," "cold," "warm," or "cool"

• Include a few physical and environmental reactions to the temperature

• Show the transition from extreme to moderate temperature

Reflection: Which sensory details proved most effective at conveying temperature?

⋙ Thursday, Mar 13: Elemental Shaping

Goal: Create imagery that reveals the dynamic relationship between physical forces and environment, making the invisible visible.

Constraints:

• Choose one primal force

• Describe visible signs of how this force has sculpted the environment

• Move from static description to suggesting movement or change

• End with the character visualizing the force actively transforming the landscape

Reflection: How might you apply this technique to show less obvious forces (time, human activity, emotion) shaping other environments?

⋙ Friday, Mar 14: Verbal Intervention

Goal: Create precise imagery through linguistic innovation, focusing attention on a specific physical movement.

Constraints:

• Invent a new verb that sounds fitting for its meaning

• Begin by establishing the context before the action occurs

• Use your invented verb without directly explaining it

• Follow with description that indirectly reveals the verb's meaning

Reflection: How did creating a specific word for a precise action change how you approached the description?

⋙ Saturday, Mar 15: Sensory Consumption

Goal: Create immersive sensory imagery focused on texture and materiality that makes readers physically respond to the description.

Constraints:

• Begin with a brief tactile description of the eating environment

• Show the interaction between utensils and food before consumption

• End with the moment of consumption using tactile words to describe the sensations

Reflection: How does focusing on texture rather than taste create a more visceral reading experience?

⋙ Sunday, Mar 16: One-Page Physical Property Story

Goal: Create a cohesive narrative where a physical property serves as both literal element and thematic metaphor.

Constraints:

• Choose one physical property explored earlier in the week

• Start with how this property affects your character physically

• Describe the setting primarily through manifestations of this property

• Include one meaningful object that embodies or interacts with this property

• End with a scene where the property undergoes a significant change, paralleling a change in the character

Reflection: How did using a physical property as both literal element and metaphor deepen your story?

3 Alternate Exercises

⋙ Sound Materialization

Goal: Create synesthetic imagery that transforms auditory experience into visual/tactile perception.

Constraints:

• Begin with a distinctive sound (natural, mechanical, musical, etc.)

• Describe how the sound appears to physically manifest in the space

• Give the sound three physical properties

• End when the sound stops or changes significantly

Reflection: What unexpected connections emerged between auditory and visual/tactile experiences?

⋙ Superhuman Senses

Goal: Create imagery that captures this experience of seeing from a new perspective.

Constraints:

• Focus on a man-made object that is being studied

• Use a device or ability to heighten the character’s perceptions

• Describe how the character discovers new data

• End with the character looking again at the subject with normal senses

Reflection: How does the new information change the character’s perception of their situation?

⋙ Physical Impossibility

Setup: A character witnesses something that seems to defy the laws of physics.

Goal: Create believable imagery for an impossible physical phenomenon that makes readers accept it momentarily.

Constraints:

• Choose one basic physical law to subtly violate

• Begin with normal physical behavior before introducing the anomaly

• Use precise, concrete details to describe the impossible phenomenon

• Include the character's physical (not emotional) reaction

Reflection: What specific details made your impossible phenomenon feel momentarily believable?

Leave a comment

Imagery might be the heart of writing. The world presents us with almost limitless information. The human eye reduces this into manageable packets of data that it can process. The pen further distills these perceptions into a set of symbols with even less information. But through writing we see can things that have never existed and can make them real in the reader’s mind.

This week we’ll fly over five main focal points before diving in for a closer look in coming weeks. What makes a great image? We’ll cover five features that can inject imagery with significance.

• Physical Phenomena: How do natural forces shape perception?

• Composition & Framing: How are elements arranged?

• Subject & Juxtaposition: What’s in the image, and how do elements interact?

• Psychological & Symbolic Meaning: How does the brain interpret the imagery?

• The Human Touch: Are there signs of a human touch?

This Week’s Streak Savers 🪦

⋙ Monday, Mar 03: A Scene Snapshot

Goal: Paint a clear picture to use as a baseline for analysis and comparison.

Constraints:

• Stick to what we can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch

• Keep the action simple—no conversations or deep thoughts

• Write until the scene feels complete.

Reflection: Which details jumped out as most vivid to you? Do you see any areas where you want to improve?

⋙ Tuesday, Mar 04: Physical Properties

Goal: Write a description using only the object's physical properties.

Constraints:

• Focus on color, light, texture, weight, temperature, and movement

• Avoid naming the object or its parts

• No comparisons to other objects

Reflection: Which physical properties proved most essential to your description?

⋙ Wednesday, Mar 05: Scene Frame

Goal: Write a description that captures how the elements are arranged within your chosen frame.

Constraints:

• Decide if your frame is tall, wide, or square

• Either draw a frame or imagine it

• Position the main elements before you begin writing

• Include only what fits within your frame

Reflection: How did choosing a frame shape influence which details you included?

⋙ Thursday, Mar 06: A Web of Associations

Goal: Follow a trail of associations until you find something compelling to describe in detail.

Constraints:

• Write down words that connect to your starting point

• Turn abstract words into specific examples

• Choose one subject to describe, weaving in related elements

Reflection: What made you stop and focus on your chosen subject? Did the associated words give you a wider base to work from, or did they distract?

⋙ Friday, Mar 07: Coloring Perception

Goal: Describe the scene through the eyes of someone who has strong feelings about what they're seeing.

Constraints:

• Write in first person, present tense

• Choose either love or hatred as the lens

• Show feeling through description, not direct statements

Reflection: Which details revealed the most about your narrator's perspective?

⋙ Saturday, Mar 08: Traces Left in Spaces

Goal: Show human presence through the marks and changes left behind in the space.

Constraints:

• No people in the scene

• Focus on signs of activity and use

• Include details that suggest actions or past events

Reflection: Which details best revealed the human stories in this space?

⋙ Sunday, Mar 09: Character in Detail

Goal: Create a detailed portrait that captures their essence through vivid imagery.

Constraints:

• Begin with their physical form

• Write from an all-seeing perspective

• Build outward to show their impact on their surroundings

• Layer in details that reveal their inner nature

Reflection: Which details best captured both the outer and inner presence of your character?

3 Alternate Exercises

⋙ Light Moving Fast

Goal: Show how changing light transforms familiar objects, spaces, and activities.

Constraints:

• Choose three distinct times of day

• Focus on shadows, reflections, and color shifts

• Show how activities and objects change in the shifting light.

Reflection: How did different lighting change what details caught your attention?

⋙ Shifting Scales

Goal: Reveal how distance changes what we notice and how we describe it.

Constraints:

• Start in the middle distance

• Gradually push in to reveal details

• End with a wide view that changes the meaning

Reflection: Which distance revealed the most interesting details about your subject?

⋙ A Touch of the Weather

Goal: Show how weather changes not just what we see, but how we perceive a place.

Constraints:

• Show the weather changing between two contrasting states

• Include multiple senses beyond sight

• Show how the weather affects materials, mood, and activities

Reflection: Which sensory details best captured the weather's influence?

Leave a comment

Ever had one of those moments? The taxi driver is trying to talk to you in the back seat. Why do they keep looking at you in the rear view mirror? Shouldn’t they keep their eyes on the road?

We’re hardwired to interrogate faces. We expect conversation to contain more than words, and the taxi driver just wants to see your reaction. That’s why it’s so important not to fall into floating head syndrome when writing dialogue. Last week we looked at dialogue in isolation. Now we’re going to practice mixing dialogue with description.

This can be a tough task for the writer because your brain is juggling multiple contexts and perspectives. The narrator’s perspective is being mixed with each character’s POV. That’s why it’s common for writers to write dialogue separately, ten fill in the action. This week we’ll practice some strategies for mitigating the brain drain. Wouldn’t it be nice to just write freely and still manage all that context?

This Week’s 7 Streak Savers 🪦

⋙ Monday, Feb 24: Adding Gestures to Dialogue

Goal: Write dialogue that uses gestures to reveal what the characters aren't saying directly.

Constraints:

• Write a few lines of pure dialogue first

• Edit to add one gesture or action after each line of dialogue

• Each gesture must either support or contradict what's being said

Modification: Increase the challenge by having the characters misunderstand each other.

Reflection: How did adding gestures change the meaning of the dialogue? Which gestures felt most impactful?

⋙ Tuesday, Feb 25: Layering Dialogue Over Action

Goal: Create contrast between what the characters are doing and what they're discussing.

Constraints:

• Write one paragraph describing the shared task

• Edit to add a few lines of dialogue about something unrelated

• Keep the action flowing between the dialogue

Reflection: How did the contrast between the dialogue and action affect the scene's mood?

⋙ Wednesday, Feb 26: Converting Dialogue to Action

Goal: Show coordination through a mix of dialogue and action, replacing unnecessary speech with description.

Constraints:

• Write the scene first as pure dialogue

• Have parts of the dialogue refer to actions and observations

• Replace some dialogue with descriptions of actions

• Keep only the speech that couldn't be shown through action

Reflection: Which moments worked better as action rather than dialogue? Why?

⋙ Thursday, Feb 27: Using the Zoom to Break Dialogue

Goal: Break up dialogue naturally by shifting the narrative focus from close to wide and back again.

Constraints:

• Begin with focused dialogue

• Insert a paragraph that widens to show the full setting

• End by zooming in on one specific detail

Reflection: How did the changes in scale affect the dialogue's pacing and tension?

⋙ Friday, Feb 28: Breaking the Script

Goal: Transform a routine exchange by weaving in observations that build to an unexpected moment.

Constraints:

• Start writing the expected script

• Pause to add distinct observations between exchanges

• End with a moment that breaks from the usual pattern

Modification: For more challenge, make the observations build on each other.

Reflection: How did the observations change the meaning of the routine dialogue?

⋙ Saturday, Mar 1: Weaving Past and Present

Goal: Move smoothly between present conversation and past events while maintaining a clear sense of the current setting.

Constraints:

• Ground each shift to the past with a present detail

• Include three physical details that exist in both times

• Don’t lose track of either the past or present scene

Modification: For more challenge, make the present day conversation gradually reveal the importance of this memory.

Reflection: Which details most effectively linked the past and present moments?

⋙ Sunday, Mar 2: Summarizing Then Speaking

Goal: Drafting a scene with summarized dialogue, then selectively expand into speech.

Constraints:

• Write the scene first without any actual dialogue

• Treat the dialogue as summarized actions

• Read the scene and decide which summaries need to be expanded

• Replace select summaries with actual dialogue

Reflection: What made you choose to keep some dialogue summarized while expanding others?

3 Alternate Exercises

⋙ Dialogue Through Objects

Goal: Let objects carry part of the conversation's meaning through how characters interact with them.

Constraints:

• Choose one or more objects that matter to the characters

• Write dialogue that never directly mentions the objects

• Show characters handling the objects between lines

Reflection: How did the objects' presence change what needed to be said in dialogue?

⋙ Environmental Interruptions

Goal: Create natural breaks in dialogue using environmental elements that force characters to react.

Constraints:

• Insert three different environmental interruptions

• Make each interruption progressively more intrusive

• End when the environment forces them to stop talking

Reflection: How did the interruptions affect the conversation's momentum?

⋙ Parallel Conversations

Goal: Weave together dialogue and silent action to create two parallel storylines.

Constraints:

• Alternate between dialogue and the silent character's actions

• Never let the speaking characters directly acknowledge the third person

• Make the silent action comment on or contrast with the dialogue

Reflection: How did the silent action change the meaning of the conversation?

Leave a comment

Imagine you’re cooking dinner, but you’re not in your own safe, reliable, well-organized kitchen. You fool! Why did you volunteer to cook dinner at your friend’s house? You were hoping to impress them with your lamb and blue cheese ravioli, and nothing is where you expect it to be. The pasta strainer isn’t in the corner cabinet where it should be. You open every drawer, searching for a spatula only to find it hanging from a hook above the stove (okay, that makes sense). You’re trying to make ravioli, but instead of focusing on cooking, you’re wasting time looking for basic tools.

You don’t feel stupid—just frustrated. And now you’re insulting your friend and not making a good impression at all.

Why is this even in the oven? What kind of knuckle-dragging ape-shaped man-baby stores a colander in the broiler rack? Are you insane?

Sorry, Phil. My bad. Let’s just enjoy our slightly overcooked ravioli.

Writing can feel the same way. You’ve read countless books on craft, analyzed the canonical great novels of lit-er-a-ture, and absorbed all the advice on dialogue, conflict, pacing, and subtext that can be stuffed into a brain-shaped sponge. You know what good writing looks like. But when you sit down to write, the experience is plodding, slow, effortful, and infuriating. You recognize something isn’t working, but fixing it feels like searching for that hide-and-seek pasta strainer—under those conditions you don’t have the fluency to execute smoothly.

Many of us give up on cooking altogether. And by cooking I mean writing. And by writing I mean writing in very specific contexts.

This isn’t because you “lack talent” or because there’s some mysterious “taste gap.” It’s simply a fluency gap—a disconnect between what you know about writing and what your writing skills can execute effortlessly. This is knowledge of writing which you can only acquire through experience.

You’re trying to cook a souffle but the only cake you’ve ever baked came in a box labeled Betty Crocker.

⋙ Why This Happens

Writing is a complex skill made up of many micro-skills:

• Write dialogue that moves the story forward

• Create characters with agency and flaws

• Balance subtext, conflict, and character motivation

• Structure sentences effectively for reader interpretation

• Oh, my!

When you read great fiction or even just good stories, these things feel obvious. It’s like seeing or eating a finished cake where someone forgot an ingredient—you’d notice that immediately. I mean, how does somebody forget the flour? But knowing what good writing looks like isn’t the same as being fluent in executing it. If you’re trying to juggle too many unfamiliar writing skills at once, you overload your brain, and the experience of writing feels exhausting rather than fun or even mildly satisfying.

And that can lead to avoidance, especially if you think something is missing from your toolkit. You might go in search of the very thing that is overloading your brain: knowledge about writing.

This is why reading about writing can sometimes make the problem worse—your knowledge keeps growing, but fluency hasn’t caught up. It’s like adding more ingredients to your meal before you even know where the whisk is. That’s whisky business.

⋙ The Solution: Focused, Constrained Practice

The way to bridge the fluency gap isn’t to learn more theory—it’s to write in a way that allows you to attune to the skills of writing, piece by piece, bit by bit. “Bird by bird,” as Anne Lamott’s dad once said.

This is where constrained writing exercises come in. (Yes, I’m selling something here. But don’t worry, it’s free and for your own benefit.) Instead of sitting down to “write a great story”, focus on one small, adaptable skill at a time—like learning where the colander is before you boil the water for the ravioli.

Each exercise gives you:
✅ A setup (so you know where to start)
✅ A clear goal (what you’re trying to accomplish)
✅ Constraints (to keep cognitive load manageable)

By isolating a specific aspect of writing and practicing it in a focused way, you develop fluency faster—so that when you sit down to write a full story, those micro-skills happen automatically rather than requiring conscious effort.

Writing isn’t about storing a bunch of knowledge and pulling it out when needed. It’s about becoming attuned to the act of writing itself—until finding the right words feels as natural as reaching for a colander in your own kitchen, right there nestled in the “big” cooking pot.

Wait, what do you mean? “That’s not where I keep the colander.” Are you insane?

Never mind, sorry about that. Let’s just press the button to subscribe and we can sit down together and do some daily writing exercises, okay?

Subscribe now

This Week’s Streak Saver 🪦

While we’re here, we might as well jump into a writing exercise inspired by our central metaphor.

⋙ Familiar vs. Unfamiliar Spaces

Goal: Improve reader immersion through the use of detailed, embodied action.

Constraints:

• Write the same mundane action two times

• First version: completely imagined space

• Second version: a room you know intimately

• Focus on physical details of the action

Reflection: Did you notice differences in writing speed or your ability to focus on other craft elements? Does either passage seem more immersive?

Dialogue can be delightful—unless, of course, you’re an author trying to write delightful dialogue. For the reader, good dialogue feels like a fun puzzle or a fascinating game of chess. As social animals we love to pick apart the layers of meaning in a good conversation.

Writing this kind of dialogue can be cognitively demanding. Hard work. Speech has so many functions. I like to think of dialogue as a layer cake where you have author intent, externality, internality, and reader interpretation stacked on top of each other.

The bottom layer is author intent where you are using the characters a bit like puppets to drop exposition, communicate with each other, and move the story forward. Basic plain vanilla dialogue. The second layer of the cake is externality where we add conflict, manipulation, and maybe even some forms of external distortion. The third layer adds internality to the flavor profile. What sort of internal conflicts and internal distortions surface? Finally, the icing on the cake is reader interpretation. These are the delightful bits we add to the dialogue to just plain entertain the reader, like voice, humor, and wit.

Dialogue doesn’t have to use all of these layers. Sometimes your reader doesn’t want the whole slice of cake. Or maybe you’re still learning to bake that first layer. That’s fine. Work where you’re at, but add just enough challenge to level up your dialogue.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Streak Savers 🪦

⋙ Monday, Feb 17: A Casual Conversation

Goal: Write dialogue that informs, communicates, and/or moves the story forward.

Constraints:

• The first lines must weave in story exposition

• Focus throughout on characters communicating information

• The last lines lead to a clear next action

Modification: For a bit of fun, write some “maid and butler” dialogue using phrases like, “as you know”, while setting up the next chapter.

Reflection: Did the dialogue sometimes feel a bit too “on the nose” i.e. lacking subtext or nuance?

⋙ Tuesday, Feb 18: A Subtle Manipulation

Goal: Write dialogue where one character slightly manipulates the other without showing their hand.

Constraints:

• The character can't state what they want

• Don’t have the character lie

• Their true goal must be clear to the reader

Modification: As a challenge, create a more direct conflict where both characters want something.

Reflection: Was it difficult to signal intent to the reader while creating a reasonable manipulation?

⋙ Wednesday, Feb 19: Dialogue with Distortion

Goal: Write dialogue where miscommunication increases the tension.

Constraints:

• Start with both characters trying to make things better

• Include a misunderstanding, exaggeration, or misdirection

• End with their relationship deeply wounded

Reflection: How did the conversation's tone shift when the distortion occurred?

⋙ Thursday, Feb 20: Dialogue with Inner Conflict

Goal: Write dialogue that hints at a character's inner struggle.

Constraints:

• One character must ask for a clear yes/no decision

• The other stalls, clearly conflicted internally

• Write until someone exits the conversation

Reflection: What subtle ways did you show the character's uncertainty?

⋙ Friday, Feb 21: Dialogue with Delusion

Goal: Write dialogue that shows how a character's inner world distorts their perception.

Constraints:

• Start with normal conversation

• Gradually reveal the character's warped perspective

• End with the character doubling down

Reflection: How did you balance making the distortion clear to readers while keeping the situation believable?

⋙ Saturday, Feb 22: Dialogue with Reader Appeal

Goal: Write dialogue that makes readers grin using voice, humor, and/or wit.

Constraints:

• Make your fun character's voice distinct

• Keep the other character's responses stiff

• End with the stiff character warming up

Modification: Make your character delightfully unlikable and challenge the other character to remain civil.

Reflection: What dialogue choices made your character most entertaining?

⋙ Sunday, Feb 23: The Many-Storied Dialogue

Goal: Transform basic dialogue into something complex and delightful by adding layers one at a time.

Constraints:

• Write a simple exchange that simply tells the story

• Revise or rewrite to add external conflicts or goals for both characters

• Add internal conflicts or distortions for at least one character

• Edit or redraft to add elements of voice, wit, or cleverness

Modification: As an added challenge, try working each layer backward, from voice, to interanlity, to externality, and finally to the story progression.

Reflection: Which layer changed your dialogue the most? Was there a level where you felt most comfortable working?

We all operate at our own level of skill. Some of us are still working through the tutorial levels ✋ (that’s my hand going up). Unfortunately, we can lose our writing streak by attempting too much. A good challenge builds skills, but it’s possible to overwhelm ourselves and feel like we failed, not realizing we just need to adjust the weight we’re trying to lift.

So this week we’re learning to estimating scope. What can you fit on a page and how do your content, structure, and style choices affect that scope?

Each exercise is a variation on a theme. You’re going to fill one page—whatever that means to you. Officially, a page is about 250 to 300 words, but adjust that constraint to fit the time or space you want to fill.

We’re trying to develop an intuitive sense of how different choices affect the shape and scale of your story. Hard hard of a lift is it going to be?

Subscribe now

This Week’s Streak Savers 🪦

⋙ Monday, Feb 10: The Map and the Territory

Goal: You will write one page that brings this aspect of your world to life for the reader with a focus on immersion.

Constraints:

• Before writing, decide what characters, settings, and objects to include.

• Imagine the blank page and where these elements will be placed.

• Write until you fill a single page, taking note of how the text matched your expectations.

Reflection: Were you able to fit everything you wanted on the page? Were some elements missing important details or texture?

⋙ Tuesday, Feb 11: The Arc of Narrative

Goal: You will guide the reader through a compelling arc in one page, focusing on an engaging change or evolution.

Constraints:

• Decide on one or more pivotal events in the character's journey if not the complete arc.

• Pinpoint each event and important developments on the page and imagine what occurs between them.

• Write until you have filled the page.

Reflection: How did the number of events and actions affect the significance you could give to each change in the arc? Did the writing feel rushed or incomplete?

⋙ Wednesday, Feb 13: An Unforeseen Twist

Goal: Write a page that leads the reader down one path, only to surprise them.

Constraints:

• Consider what shifts through time are needed to set up and execute the twist.

• In what order should the information be revealed to maximize the impact of the twist?

• Write until you fill a single page.

Reflection: How much space did the time shifts take on the page? Did you have to sacrifice any build-up or aftermath to fit everything on one page?

⋙ Thursday, Feb 14: Cognitive Dissonance

Goal: Write one page that introduces an inconsistency or surprise, making the reader doubt their assumptions.

Constraints:

• Incorporate shifts in framing, such as description, dialogue, and introspection.

• Decide the most impactful order for these shifts.

• Stop when you fill the page.

Reflection: How did the shifts in framing affect the scope of the narrative?

⋙ Friday, Feb 15: Thematic Resonance

Goal: Create a page that examines your chosen theme through carefully selected literary devices.

Constraints:

• Select a number or rhetorical devices like symbolism, metaphor, parallel structure, irony, or motif.

• Place your chosen devices at the beginning, middle, and end of your page.

• Fill exactly one page, ensuring each device receives adequate emphasis and development.

Reflection: Did any of your rhetorical devices require extra space to fully develop?

⋙ Saturday, Feb 16: The Voice of the People

Goal: Write a page that is tailored to those readers, taking into account their reading level, interests, and expectations.

Constraints:

• Choose an appropriate level of lyricism, considering the use of figurative language, sound, and imagery.

• Consider any contexts that might alter the tone or voice, such as a character’s particular voice or modulation due to setting.

• Write until you fill a single page.

Reflection: How did your choice of audience affect the flow of your writing on the page?

⋙ Sunday, Feb 17: The Incredible Shrinking Action

Goal: Demonstrate how the same action can be collapsed or expanded to fit narrative context and available space.

Constraints:

• First write a full page describing only the action itself, as if it were a passage in a full-length story.

• Next, collapse that action into a single paragraph as if it were part of a compressed scene.

• Finally, reduce the action to a single sentence as if it were part of a flash fiction.

Reflection: How did the significance and impact of your chosen action change as you compressed or expanded its description?

Dropping the ball, it seems like that’s what I do here on Writing Streak. Maybe I’m just showing you how to recover when you lose your own writing steak? Ehh? Are you buying that excuse? No?

Okay, truth is, I’m in a period of transition. First of all, I’m spending less time online so I can reclaim my time for writing. Secondly, I’m rebuilding my own writing streak which is taking up a lot of time and focus. And third, this intense focus has me re-evaluating exactly how these exercises I publish should be constructed. Am I creating anything useful?

I want to put more emphasis on creating valuable exercises for you, the reader/writer, by validating the effectiveness of each exercise. This newsletter started as a way for me to deliver writing exercises to my own inbox. It was for my eyes only.

I want to adjust that process. Move my own writing practice up front. Trial the exercises. Refine them. Then deliver them to your inbox.

Even though I have some exercises ready to go in the queue, I’m going to pause on posting that set of exercises and do what I normally do (use the exercises myself), but this time with an eye towards validating their effect and refining them.

This week, though, I’m going to give you my favorite writing exercise. This exercise is my masterclass. You’ll need a story to use as a model, but because of that you can repeat it as often as you like and learn something new each and every time.

This Week’s (Singular) Streak Saver 🪦

⋙ Break Some Eggs, Make an Omelet

Part 1: Deconstruct a Page

Goal: Analyze and summarize the structure of the page without naming specific characters, locations, or plot points.

Constraints:

1. Write a brief summary of what happens on the page, focusing only on content and structural elements (e.g., "An argument escalates until one character leaves, prompting the other to reflect on their emotions").

2. Note any patterns, such as shifts between dialogue and description, the use of sensory details, or moments of tension and release.

3. Identify one interesting technique the author used (e.g., pacing, perspective shifts) and consider its purpose.

Modification: For an additional challenge, summarize the style of the text. Is it clear, lyrical, logical, or highly descriptive? What audience is it written for and how do they write for that audience?

Reflection: What patterns or techniques did you notice that you typically wouldn’t think about while reading? How do these choices affect pacing, mood, or character development?

Part 2: Recreate the Pattern

This part can be done immediately following Part 1 or separately at a later time.

Setup: Use the summary you wrote in Part 1 to construct a new passage. Brainstorm your own characters, setting, and story events to apply the pattern to.

Goal: Experiment with how structure shapes a narrative by writing a new passage inspired by the page you deconstructed.

Constraints:

1. Use the structure and pacing from your summary to guide the new scene.

2. Maintain the pattern's key elements (e.g., if the original scene opened with dialogue and transitioned to action, follow that progression).

3. Experiment with how the content shifts when you focus on different details or tones.

Modification: Flip a key element of the pattern (e.g., replace a character's reflective moment with an unexpected interruption) and see how it changes the scene’s emotional impact.

Reflection: How closely did your scene align with the original pattern? What elements felt natural to you, and which ones challenged your instincts as a writer?

Some Examples of Summaries

As a bonus, I put together seven examples you can use on your own.

Example Summary 1: Suspense and Revelation

The scene begins with the POV character sensing something unusual. They proceed cautiously towards it. Their movements and observations add tension. The POV character experiences a strong emotion as the text describes an unexpected character in a dire situation.

Effect: Pacing slows to maintain tension, while each detail heightens anticipation of what’s to come.

Example Summary 2: Reflection and Decision

A character, now alone, reflects on a recent event. The narrative shifts from their thoughts to subtle details of the environment. The reflection reveals something important about their current emotional state. The page ends with a small but significant action that signals a shift in their mindset.

Effect: The balance between introspection and environmental description builds emotional depth, culminating in a meaningful turning point.

Example Summary 3: Action and Urgency

The page starts in the middle of fast-paced action. Sentences are short and direct. The character looks at an object that suggests an urgent event. They focus on their goal, and then an obstacle that put is just out of reach. After an attempt to advance, a new obstacle or threat suddenly appears.

Effect: Rapid pacing keeps the reader engaged, while brief moments of internal thought reinforce the stakes and urgency.

Example Summary 4: Subtext in Dialogue

Two characters converse, but the surface-level topic refers back to an important point of tension. Dialogue reveals differing goals or perspectives. Brief gestures hint at deeper conflict. One character deflects, and mirrors this dismissal with an action, leaving the situation unresolved but charged with unspoken meaning.

Effect: Subtle shifts in dialogue and body language create a layered, emotionally complex scene.

Example Summary 5: Discovery and Mystery

A character explores an unfamiliar space. Each sentence reveals new sensory details. Their attention shifts from the surroundings to the object they were searching for. As they study the object, they encounter something unexpected that raises questions.

Effect: Gradual discovery immerses the reader in the setting and introduces intrigue through unanswered questions.

Example Summary 6: Humorous Mishap

A character attempts a simple task, but fails because of a small error in judgement. The character makes a gesture and focuses their attention on the task. Then an external complication escalates the situation. The character now expresses a feeling of helplessness. A final gesture suggests the character has found a solution.

Effect: The combination of escalating complications and character reaction creates a comedic rhythm, offering levity and relief.

Example Summary 7: Contrasting Perspectives

Two characters enter the scene. A description shows each character noticing a different detail. In dialogue each character expresses a different priority. Finally, the POV character thinks about how they feel and what vibe they're getting about the other character's feelings. The text gradually reveals a shared point of focus, where the characters' perspectives momentarily converge.

Effect: The contrast between viewpoints adds complexity to the narrative, offering multiple angles on the same moment.