Last year, three of my friends and I concocted a plan to participate in a WriteAThon, wherein each writing athlete would strive to write a page a day for 90 days. The content was not dictated, nor the form... a page might consist of a few lines of poetry and the silence of the white space, or a visual project, or some seriously dense lit theory from the two folks working on their PhDs, or a short story, or so forth. After writing this page-a-day, we would email it to each other to hold ourselves responsible... And for 50 excellent days we were marvelous and incredible and our wings gleamed like Icarus's hearbeats. True, we ended the WriteAThon 40 days early, but for those 50 days, life was sweet.
The idea behind this blog is similar, in that it is meant to be both generative and between friends. Thus, the Very Very Rigid Rules:
1) Anyone invited may join... if you are interested, invite us to invite you!
2) We will rotate posting writing prompts/exercises, one person taking charge of the prompt each week. The line up will be posted next week and will change if we need it to.
3) Each week, the prompt will be due on Sunday.
4)You have until the following Saturday to write in response to the prompt.You can write a response to a prompt anytime you want (although within the week feels sweeter), but just remember to "label" your writing for the prompt it is response to whenever you do post it.
5) There is no mandatory check on your response, but if you slack, the muses will know and look out from unexpected places (like from the gaze of a bus co-vagrant) with eyes reminding you how talent is a responsibility although it can also be super fun.
5B) Added in honor of Jess: cheating is allowed. I don't know how you plan on cheating, but it's preferable that you cheat big enough for the cheat to be noticeable.
6) If you want to post your response, not only will I think you rock, but so will the spirits of Nabokov, Twain, Anzaldua, Homer, and Stein. Probably other spirits too, but those are the ones I can safely vouch for.
8) Prompts and exercises can be anything! I suspect that with the people who have already expressed interest, we will be an eclectic crew with many different writing styles ranging from bizarre, esoteric, round-aboutsy, avant-garde, and surreal to traditional. We like that. We heart variety. So, all prompts go: ekphrastics, oldies but goodies, vaguely obscure and hard to understand ones, damaged darlings, simple nudges, suspiciously focused exercises that seem like they have mostly to do with that last chapter that's been pestering you, Oulipo constraints, Surrealist strategies, short ones, windy ones, stolen ones, based off famous writers ones, you get the point.
9) We can post other inspirational or bizarre things if we feel like it.
10) We'll get started next week; this week we'll just set up shop.
11) Herald has snuffled, stamped and approved this message:
