Such a good writing night last night! Three of us brought prompts, and all were exciting and odd and pushed us to enter into drafts through strange doors. I invented mine late in the afternoon, off the top of my head, and was extremely pleased by the dense drafts that erupted from it.  Here it is, printed as it appeared on the page I handed out:

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Group 1: Stuff

 

reechy: smoky, squalid, dirty, rancid.

 

resinosis: in coniferous trees, an excessive flow of resin.

 

ruderate: pave with broken stone or rubble.

 

Sardoodledom: well-written but trivial or morally objectionable plays considered collectively; the milieu in which these are admired.

 

scabland: flat elevated land consisting of patchy poor thin soil with little vegetation over igneous rock.

 

Schreiklichkeit: literally, frightfulness; a deliberate military policy of terrorizing an enemy, especially a civilian population.

 

scrat:  wizard, goblin, monster, hermaphrodite.

 

quaff: a clever trick or stratagem.

 

quaesitum: that which is sought; the answer to a problem.

 

 

 

Group 2: Structure

 

We arrive as novices at every age of our life.

—Sébastien de Chamfort, 1778

 

A nonharmonious, non-serene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against . . .

—Edward Said, c. 2003

 

[The] art had overgrown itself, risen out of the habitable regions of tradition, even before the startled gaze of human eyes, into spheres of the entirely and utterly and nothing—but personal.

           —Thomas Mann, 1947

 

Proper evaluation of words and letters

In their phonetic and associated sense

Can bring the peoples of earth

Into the clear light of pure Cosmic Wisdom.

—Sun Ra, c. 1968

 

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Group 1 is a set of definitions, lifted semi-randomly, from the N-Z volume of The Shorter OED. Group 2 is a set of quotations from things I've been reading lately.

The prompt went something like this:

Group 1 is a passel of material. Circle anything that attracts you for whatever reason. Group 2 is a variety of suggestions about structure, about arrangement, about how and/or why to put words together. Borrow whatever you like from the Stuff and Structure groups to create a first draft. You have 10 minutes to write.