Directed Boris Lojkine, the award-winning French drama film Souleymane’s Story follows a young immigrant from Guinea who prepares for his interview to seek asylum refugee status in Paris. In the harrowing forty-eight hours prior to his interview, Souleymane careens through the streets as a bike courier for a food delivery app account he rents for a hefty fee from a fellow immigrant, tries to memorize falsified stories about political imprisonment another immigrant coaches him on for a fee, and rushes to find a bed each night in a homeless shelter. Write a personal essay that recounts a momentous event from your life and begins forty-eight hours before the climactic scene. Try playing with focused descriptions of your surroundings and the style of your prose to reflect the pacing and dramatic moments of your story.

What kind of effect can a casual, offhand compliment have on a stranger? According to social psychology research, compliments benefit both the giver and receiver, spread positive emotions, and are usually more welcome than expected. This week write a short story in which the bestowing of a compliment has a ripple effect and transforms, in slight or significant ways, the lives of both the giver and the receiver. Spend some time considering how you wish to set up the trajectory of each character before the compliment is given and what compels this exchange to occur. Is the admirer moved to say something in the moment or is this something they’ve been wanting to say for a long time?

In a 2023 BOMB Magazine interview by Wendy Xu, she asks Emily Lee Luan about the cinematic, image-specific aesthetic of the poems in her collection 回 / Return (Nightboat Books, 2023). “I think my poems try to understand internal emotional change through the external world—that might be why image and scene are so central,” says Luan. “If you look at something for long enough, then you might be able to understand what’s happening within you.” Take inspiration from this juxtaposition between interiority and externality, and the notion of finding understanding and connection through prolonged observation, and write a poem that uses extensive imagery to reflect the speaker’s internal emotional state. In lieu of expository description, how does imagistic expression lend a different kind of dynamism to your work?

How much creative work do you do in a day? When Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei was asked this question for the New York Times Style Magazine’s Artist’s Questionnaire series, he said, “My work is trying to break the boundary of what is normally called ‘creative.’ I avoid trying to be creative. I try to push myself into normal life and bring the integrity of a normal life into the so-called art world.” Take inspiration from the idea of breaking down these boundaries and consider all the different ways your creative identity potentially bleeds over into your daily tasks and vice versa. Write a personal essay that begins with an exploration of how your relationship to language, craft, or aesthetics has affected your general outlook. Then expand on how this artistic perspective manifests in your day-to-day habits, actions, and interactions.