What I Do When I'm Stuck

Writing a poem every day is hard. Writing is hard. One has to call up images and ideas out of the brain, and those images and ideas, sorry to say, aren't always there to be had. I used to feel like I had poem and essay and story ideas arrive, already cut from the cloth. But if I waited for them now, I'd never get a word on the page. My brain is far (far) too crowded.

So somehow, and I can't really remember how, I came up with this system:



Step 1: Find a pretty box

Step 2: Go through old magazines and cut out every picture that strikes your fancy. Pretty ones, gruesome ones, weird ones. Advertisements are often better than actual articles for this. Advertising is pretty darn clever. I have a picture in that box of a girl wearing a dress made out of white porcelain teacups. It doesn't get much more clever/interesting than that.

Step 3: So now you should have a stack of pictures, a pile of them, a cohort. Grab a random handful of these images and spread them out in front of you.



Step 4: This is the step that I can't explain. Let the cutouts trigger lines and images, memories, dialogue, character, setting, whatever. You have to sort of turn your brain to jello here, and let it meander around in what you have in front of you. See what happens. I've found ways to write about stuff I had absolutely no entry into, using these images. I wrote a story this week, based on pictures of a sliced tennis ball, the Milky Way, and feet.

(Optional Step 5: Teaching. This makes a fantastic teaching tool. My students' biggest problem--one of the biggest--was that when they tried to think of images, they were boring. Their stories had absolutely no tangible objects in them, no details, aside from a passing reference to spaghetti on page three or some such. These pictures helped more than I can say. I'd either give each of them one at a time and we'd pass it once they'd found a way to put it in (sort of a game approach) or I'd grabbag each of them a random stack and they'd get to work that way. Gosh those poems were great, the ones that came out of this. Some of the best I've seen.)

Plus, the box really is pretty, no? I was never sorry on a day I got to carry it around.