Ideas for experimenting and initiating new work:

Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments (adapted)

* Pick a word or phrase at random, let mind play freely around it until a
few ideas have come up, then seize on one and begin to write. Try this with
a non- connotative word, like “so” etc.

* Systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from
a piece of writing: eliminate all adjectives from a poem of your own, or
take out all words beginning with ’s’ in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

* Systematically derange the language: write a work consisting only of
prepositional phrases, or, add a gerund to every line of an already existing
work.

* Get a group of words, either randomly selected or thought up, then form
these words (only) into a piece of writing-whatever the words allow. Let
them demand their own form, or, use some words in a predetermined way.

Design words.

* Eliminate material systematically from a piece of your own writing until
it is “ultimately” reduced, or, read or write it backwards, line by line or
word by word. Read a novel backwards.

* Using phrases relating to one subject or idea, write about another,
pushing metaphor and simile as far as you can. For example, use science
terms to write about childhood or philosophic language to describe a shirt.

* Write as you think, as close as you can come to this, that is, put pen to
paper and don’t stop. Experiment writing fast and writing slow.

* Get someone to write for you, pretending they are you.

* Read or write a story or myth, then put it aside and, trying to remember
it, write it five or ten times at intervals from memory. Or, make a work out
of continuously saying, in a column or list, one sentence or line, over and
over in different ways, until you get it “right.”

* Make a pattern of repetitions.

* Take an already written work of your own and insert, at random or by
choice, a paragraph or section from, for example, a psychology book or a
seed catalogue. Then study the possibilities of rearranging this work or
rewriting the “source.”

* Explore the possibilities of lists, puzzles, riddles, dictionaries,
almanacs, etc. Consult the thesaurus where categories for the word “word”
include: word as news, word as message, word as information, word as story,
word as order or command, word as vocable, word as instruction, promise,
vow, contract.

* The possibilities of synesthesia in relation to language and words: the
word and the letter as sensations, colors evoked by letters, sensations
caused by the sound of a word as apart from its meaning, etc. And the effect
of this phenomenon on you; for example, write in the water, on a moving
vehicle.

* Do experiments with sensory memory: record all sense images that remain
from breakfast, study which senses engage you, escape you.

* Write, taking off from visual projections, whether mental or mechanical,
without thought to the word in the ordinary sense, no craft.

* Attempt to eliminate all connotation from a piece of writing and vice
versa.
* Experiment with writing in a group, collaborative work: a group writing

* Dream work: record dreams daily, experiment with translation or
transcription of dream thought, attempt to approach the tense and
incongruity appropriate to the dream, work with the dream until a poem or
song emerges from it, use the dream as an alert form of the mind’s activity
or consciousness, consider the dream a problem-solving device, change dream
characters into fictional characters, accept dream’s language as a gift.

* Choose a subject you would like to write “about.” Then attempt to write a
piece that absolutely avoids any relationship to that subject. Get someone
to grade you.
* Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses.

* Work with a number of objects, moving them around on a field or
surface-describe their shifting relationships, resonances, associations. Or,
write a series of poems that have only to do with what you see in the place
where you most often write. Or, write a poem in each room of your house or
apartment. Experiment with doing this in the home you grew up in, if
possible.

* Write five short expressions of the most adamant anger; make a work out of
them.
* Write a work gazing into a mirror without using the pronoun I.

* Meditate on a word, sound or list of ideas before beginning to write.

* Write a work that attempts to include the names of all the physical
contents of the terrestrial world that you know.

* If you have an answering machine, record all messages received for one
month, then turn them into a best-selling novella.

* Write a macaronic poem (making use of as many languages as you are
conversant with).

* Attempt to speak for a day only in questions; write only in questions.

* Attempt to become in a state where the mind is flooded with ideas; attempt
to keep as many thoughts in mind simultaneously as possible. Then write
without looking at the page, typescript or computer screen (This is “called”
invisible writing).

* Turn a list of the objects that have something to do with a person who has
died into a poem or poem form, in homage to that person.

* Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in Science by finding out how
thought becomes language, or does not.

* Write poems and proses in which you set yourself the task of using
particular words, chosen at random like the spelling exercises of children:
intelligence, amazing, weigh, weight, camel, camel’s, foresight, through,
threw, never, now, snow, rein, rain. Make a story of that!

* Exercises in style: Write twenty-five or more different versions of one
event.