ACTIVITY BOX

Small and Easy to Swallow Purgatives for Writer’s Block; Stimulants for Novel Ideas; & Curatives for Sluggish Blood

1. Cultivate boredom. A place between is essential for new ideas. Take steps to find this space. Is it a short train journey? A coffee shop that’s particularly unstimulating? Keep your notebook in your bag or pocket.

2. Write a few sentences about an experience you had of doing something for the first time that you thought you couldn’t do and that now comes pretty easily to you, e.g. riding a bike, using a computer, a new mobile phone.

3. Identify what’s blocking your writing – address a curse in its name. Write the curse in red ink and bury it in the garden or in a plant pot.

4. Have you ever entered a house or room when you shouldn’t have? Write about the experience. Describe the room in minute detail, as well as your feelings. What did you find?

5. Write a list (no need to be definitive) of ten books you have loved or that have some meaning to you in some way. Next to each book, write three words you’d use to describe it, or which take you to the time of reading. Find connections with what you have written.

6. Write a poem or piece of writing infused with a colour, without actually naming the colour. See if you can make it painterly, e.g. an imaginative walk encountering a frog, a fern curling or a glass of lime juice.

7. If you could take a week outside of your everyday life to do nothing but read and write, where would you go? Describe your week. What do you need?

8. Sit still and quiet, and listen. Listen and identify each of the sounds you can hear. Write them down; the pipes rushing with water, a passing car, a floorboard thud from another flat. Keep going until you come upon a sound that you can’t identify. What might it be?