Frederick Wiseman, the late director renowned for his lengthy documentaries about various American institutions and infrastructures—including Hospital; City Hall; Welfare; Titicut Follies; Near Death; and Belfast, Maine—spoke in a 2015 BOMB magazine interview about how humor is interspersed throughout his films, which are oftentimes incisive exposés of injustice, neglect, and grief. “I think all my films are funny,” said Wiseman. “You find yourself in a lot of situations that are funny. Or sometimes they are both funny and sad. I mean, the best comedy is sad comedy.” Think back to some past experiences that you would characterize as sad or sorrowful and write an essay in which you try to find a thread of humor to draw out. How can sad comedy demonstrate the ways in which human emotions are more complex than at first glance?

Can crystals offer luck, calmness, good vibrations, courage, or protection? Human beings have a long history of believing that certain crystals, such as quartz, tiger’s eye, pyrite, citrine, and tourmaline, contain special energies to benefit one’s life. A recent scientific study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology looks at chimpanzees behaving in ways that seem to demonstrate a particular interest in crystals: selecting them out of a variety of rocks, carrying them back to their sleeping quarters, and only giving them up after hours of negotiation with favored foods. Write a short story that revolves around the discovery of a mysterious crystal. What kind of powers does the crystal hold, if any? Do your characters have differing opinions or beliefs about the general existence of mystical powers, energies, and vibrations?

“Sometimes colors become points of departure to go into stories or anecdotes from things that I believe correspond to those colors,” says writer and comedian Julio Torres explaining the origins of his solo theater project, Color Theories, in an interview with Douglas Corzine published in the Brooklyn Rail last fall. In the show, Torres performs a memoiristic blend of stand-up and art lecture that “engages with the idea that colors are a form of classification, like saying something is a mineral, animal, or vegetable, something is either red or blue or yellow or green, et cetera.” Launching off from this idea, compose a series of short poems, each focusing on a different color. Incorporate ideas, moods, people, and abstract things in the world—such as systems or cultural concepts—that you associate with that color. How might vastly different objects and memories be categorized as the same color?

In Sam Needleman’s recent interview with essayist and novelist Darryl Pinckney, published in the Paris Review’s Art of Nonfiction series, he is asked about James Baldwin’s singularity. “Baldwin has this unmistakable voice. The appeal is that it’s at once literary and speakerly,” says Pinckney. “I think the writers, the essayists I’m drawn to have that quality.” This week think of a nonfiction writer whose voice strikes you as sounding distinctively original. Write an essay that attempts to investigate how their individuality is expressed through their use of language and specific observations. Can you pinpoint specific nuances about their writerly style? How does their writing communicate in both literary and “speakerly” ways?

A pivotal scene in the first season of Jacob Tierney’s hit television series Heated Rivalry, an adaptation of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers queer hockey romance novel series, occurs when Russian hockey star Ilya invites his Canadian rival Shane to his house for the first time in their relationship and offers to make him a tuna melt. While the scene lasts less than a minute and the actual assembly of the sandwich is not even depicted, the notably caring gesture struck a chord with fans, inspiring new attention to—and even recipes for—the unassuming sandwich. Write a short story in which an act of care, perhaps revolving around the sharing of food, communicates something significant about your characters’ personalities, states of mind, or relationship. Does this simple act melt hearts?

“You were almost apologetic when you said it today. / We were having coffee, checking e-mail, & the grapefruit / Juice shone with pulp,” begins Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s poem “I Might Not Be Here,” published this month in the New Yorker. The five words in the poem’s title have presumably been spoken by the narrator’s spouse, the “you” addressed throughout the poem, and the tension of those words hover over the scene. Later, the narrator remarks, “Five words / Stalk my future with you.” The poem shifts between details of the room where the words were uttered to thoughts related to senescence and the trajectory of love, life, and art. Write a poem that expounds on a short sentence that carries a lot of weight between two people. Recount details of the place in which the words were said to sit in the moment.

In her essay “Creativity as resistance,” published on the Creative Independent, Kemi Ajisekola makes a case for creative work as a powerful tool to instigate transformation within cultures and point out what’s wrong, noting that “creativity isn’t a retreat from reality. It’s one of the ways reality gets reshaped.” Take some time to think up a short list of specific things around you that need to be changed, whether within the systems and structures in your immediate community or society at large. Write a personal essay that points out what’s broken and envisions where a new direction could take us. Can you imagine innovative ways to demonstrate care? How do your personal values come into play for these hopeful plans?

“Upside Down, Anyways,” “An Economy of a Murder,” “The Beauty and the Shed,” “Bend Over Pac-Man,” and “The Big Girl” are all mistaken movie titles that theatergoers have requested to see according to a box office staff in New York who has kept track of these amusing and sometimes perplexing blunders. The correct titles are, respectively, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Anatomy of a Fall, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Bend It Like Beckham, and The Beguiled. Take inspiration from one of these wrong movie titles, or perhaps a mistake of your own or one that you’ve overheard, and write a short story that follows the direction of the erroneous phrase. What would happen if Pac-Man was a source of inspiration for a soccer film? How would “an economy of a murder” be explained? Allow yourself to be experimental with humor and imagery, perhaps moving toward a fabulist or speculative mode.

In Sanam Sheriff’s poem “The Emperor Pats His Lips with a Napkin,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, each line ends with renditions of the words, “object” and “subject,” a constraint the poet uses as a kind of outline. “Given that you are the object / of the emperor’s touch; given that you object // to his learnt repetition of love; given the abject / shame of a body entered by another body’s object // permanence,” begins Sherrif’s poem. Using a similar type of constraint, compose a poem that plays with different renditions of words that stem from the same or parallel roots. Play with the different verb tenses and homophonic meanings of your chosen words to paint your own portrait.

For the past several decades, artist Gordon Henderson, also known as Nib Geebles, has created yearly calendars featuring pen-and-paint illustrations of unremarkable yet distinctive buildings that he and his partner Abira Ali see on their everyday walks around their local Los Angeles neighborhoods. Hand-painted signage, unpolished and derelict storefronts, strip-mall parking lots, powerlines, and graffiti are all celebrated in this year’s “Unknown Landmarks” calendar. Brainstorm and jot down a list of some of your favorite storefronts and facades that make up the landscape where you live or work. Write a lyric essay that details a handful of these sights, reflecting on how they create a vivid portrait of your local atmosphere. What are the small, distinguishing or idiosyncratic features that give these locales an “unknown landmark” status?