Monstrous Possibility
This spring I'm taking a literary arts and theory program called Monstrous Possibility. A hybrid of creative and analytic writing, we're garnering inspiration for our work from an eclectic range of authors: Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Friedrich Neitschze, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and others. Our assignment this week is to write with constraints; that is, to establish a set of 13 rules and rituals by which to govern, not necessarily the content, but the direction of our work. (The assignment is dubbed "Toward the Zero Point", by the way, with our teachers encouraging us to "write toward meaninglessness").
So here are the conditions of my writing sessions. Before beginning to write: eat a bowl of yogurt with granola, strawberry, and apple; do one 4-7-8 breathing cycle; collect a few excellent quotes from Edith Wharton's House of Mirth; turn off cell phone; put hair up, and heat my room. While writing: use a black liquid (but not felt-tip) pen, avoid using alliteration for merely its own sake; avoid making use of space (i.e., let the words do their "non-spatial" thing); insert a reference to fruit, and insert at least one line from The House of Mirth. After writing, let hair down. All this in my last constraint: a span of 45 minutes.