The Time Is Now

Double-booking can be a hilarious premise for comedy, as in the wedding rom-com films Bride Wars and You’re Cordially Invited in which two weddings are booked for the same venue on the same day, or a terrifying setup for horror, as in the 2022 film Barbarian in which a woman arrives at a rental home already occupied by a mysterious guest. This week write a short story that revolves around a reservation error that results in characters being unexpectedly forced into sharing a space. Do the opposing parties know each other or are they complete strangers? You might consider playing with narrative perspective and incorporating portions from opposing characters’ points of view or experimenting with a fragmentary structure to evoke suspense and disorientation. Is your story a comedy or horror of errors?

To write their latest book, People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels (Columbia University Press, 2025), Tom Comitta used data compiled from a specially designed national public opinion poll on literary preference and composed two novels: a formulaic, fast-paced thriller and an experimental epistolary sci-fi romance with elderly aristocratic tennis players as protagonists. Responses to the poll included preferences and aversions to attributes such as characters’ identities, genre, verb tense, setting, and point of view. Taking a cue from this project, jot down a brief list of what you would guess to be the most and least desired attributes of poetry, including rhyme, length, diction, and imagery. Write a “Most Wanted Poem” and “Most Unwanted Poem” based on your list. How do your own idiosyncrasies and thoughts around literary taste infiltrate each piece?

In the comedic documentary series The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder helps ordinary people rehearse difficult conversations they may be dreading by creating precisely replicated environments and hiring actors to prepare for each scenario. The elaborate sets include a fully functioning bar with patrons, a household with a child actor, and an exact reproduction of a Houston airport terminal. Compose a personal essay about a necessary conversation that has been weighing on you and write out several vignettes exploring potential ways the exchange might play out given your knowledge of your own mindset as well as the person you’re confronting. Consider incorporating thoughts about how some reactions or behaviors may be impossible to predict. How might this rehearsal of sorts help calm your nerves or provide an understanding of your own social tendencies?

Can a typo inspire a story? In the opening paragraph of Anelise Chen’s memoir, Clam Down: A Metamorphosis (One World, 2025), the narrator recalls a text message from her mother wherein the phrase “calm down” has been transformed, whether through a typo or autocorrect, into “clam down.” This cryptic mistake becomes the premise for a story of metamorphosis and connections, withdrawal and closing up, and family history, as Chen weaves in mollusk science and explores a long-ago period of her father’s retreat from the family. Spend some time observing words and language you see in your daily life from text messages, signage, advertisements, and labels. Select a phrase that has the potential to be interpreted in an open way and leads you into writing a new story, perhaps one that incorporates science, the natural world, and elements of the fantastic.

The poems in Charity E. Yoro’s debut collection, Ten-cent Flower & Other Territories (First Matter Press, 2023), largely circle around the political history and her personal experience of the Hawaiʻian islands. Her poem “postcard from rome” takes on the feeling of a postcard that arrives unexpectedly in the mail—a surprising and sudden intrusion of an exotic locale. This week, write a poem titled “Postcard From…” and think back to your memories of visiting a new place. Try to reach far from what’s currently at the forefront of your mind, as well as the themes and topics you typically explore in your poetry. Allow this poem to drop in to your current body of writing like a short, evocative glimpse of another time and place—a gentle disruption to your usual flow.

“The price of the ride was listening to people talk.” This sentiment is expressed by the young narrator of Joe Westmoreland’s 2001 coming-of-age autofictional book, Tramps Like Us, reissued this week by MCD, to describe his hitchhiking adventures in search of queer belonging and identity. The novel portrays a wide range of characters Joe comes across, befriends, works with, sleeps with, and sometimes loses on the road and in various cities. Compose a memoiristic piece that recounts a cast of characters you’ve met in the past, perhaps only briefly as you traveled from one place to another, who had colorful tales about lives very different from your own. Incorporate snippets of dialogue, trying as best as possible to recall any idiosyncrasies in their speech or vocabulary. Reflect on what you learned from listening and why these stories have stayed with you through the years.

In the dystopian world of Hon Lai Chu’s novel Mending Bodies (Two Lines Press, 2025), translated from the Chinese by Jacqueline Leung, a Conjoinment Act has been passed by the government wherein people are encouraged to have their bodies surgically joined to another person, creating couples who purportedly become more fulfilled beings while providing improvements for economic and environmental states. The novel’s structure alternates between sections detailing the narrator’s struggles with her own thinking and decision-making around “conjoining” and sections of her dissertation on the program’s history, including case studies and the origins of bodily “conjoinment.” Taking inspiration from this format, create a dystopian premise in which a society’s government has instituted an optional, controversial policy. Write a short story which intersperses bits of fictionalized research within the in-scene action for a touch of surrealism.

Asked where great poems come from, Alice Notley, who passed away last month, responded in a 2024 interview for the Paris Review’s Art of Poetry series: “I think the real answer has to do with suffering, and how you perceive things after suffering. You might just freeze, but if you don’t, other worlds open to you.” In remembrance of Notley, write a poem that considers how your perceptions may have shifted in subtle or substantial ways after a time of loss or sorrow. Notley spoke of “hearing the dead” in dreams and receiving advice. What new worlds have opened up to you as a result of this difficult experience? How can you use lyric form to give voice to your emotions?

In the 1997 film Face/Off, an FBI agent survives an assassination attempt that kills his young son and is out for vengeance and justice. To foil this criminal’s next plot to bomb the city, the agent undergoes a secret surgery to replace his face with that of the criminal, only to have him surgically don the agent’s face, effectively creating a mirrored switch in physical identities and an epic showdown. Notable for its flabbergasting premise, another aspect of the film’s cult popularity is director John Woo’s signature style and trademark motifs: balletic action sequences, doves and churches, deadlocked gunfights, and coats blowing in slow motion in the wind. Write an essay about a dramatic situation from your past in which you insert small details and observations of physical description that complement the tone of your piece. How might you translate a slow-motion effect in cinema to a slow-motion moment in your storytelling?

“This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” concludes T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” described in his obituary in the New York Times as “probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English.” When considering the ending of something enormously consequential, the expectation might be that the external drama of that conclusion match one’s internal turmoil, however the sorrow of Eliot’s sentiment comes through in the idea of ending not with something explosive and abrupt, but with something much smaller, anticlimactic, and quiet. Write a short story that revolves around an ending of some sort—whether it be the world, a war, or a relationship—and include some portion of these last four lines of Eliot’s poem.