This week The New Yorker has an E.L. Doctorow story that is all dialogue and The Atlantic has a T.C. Boyle story that has (almost) no dialogue (the characters are on a vow of silence). Read both. Then take a story that you intended to write with the traditional mix of dialogue and not and write it first with all dialogue and then with no dialogue. Try to make both versions work. Now you have two stories instead of one. Who says that the style can't be the thing that makes them different stories? Nobody, that's who.

Take a look at these samples from the book Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline. Then write your own timeline.

Apparently in Japan there is a DVD of girls crying as they tell their stories. Its title is 11 Stories of Girls Crying in a Genuine Way. Write something, doesn't have to be the obvious, with that title.

This seems to be everybody's favorite video nowadays and a Rube Goldberg machine (I love that's still a household word) isn't a bad metaphor for how many narratives operate ...one thing leads to another ... but what I notice watching the machine in action is how quickly one thing leads to another and just how many cause-effect sequences there are. So write something in which one thing leads to another super-fast and many times over.



Then try writing something in which one thing leads to many things most of which lead nowhere, as in The Maze .

This is the view out my parents' dining room window this morning. The advantage of being snowed in is you can't go anywhere so suddenly you get all kinds of things done at home. Treat your writing like that. You're snowed in. You can't go anywhere. You might as well write.

I found these fake captions of Dwell magazine photos really amusing. Write a story by captioning found pictures or write an essay by captioning your own photographs.

My favorite shop (non-Internet variety), Anthropologie has started an artist's blog which is kind of interesting. One of the first entries is from Jane Campion, director of the recent Keats film Bright Star. It made me think about how filmmakers have location scouts and take all kind of photographs to record the location.

Go location scouting for a piece of writing. Take pictures. Then write.