Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel, A Little Life, centers on the complex relationships between four college friends: Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm. JB, a painter, begins a new series of portraits based on his friends, working from memory. When he paints Jude, his enigmatic friend with whom he’s grown distant, he claims it’s a tribute. However, the portrait depicts Jude mid-stumble, highlighting the distinctive walk caused by his lifelong injuries and trauma, and the image is widely seen as exploitative by their friends. This moment marks a betrayal and demonstrates how attempting to capture another person’s essence, even someone you love, can sometimes be dangerous. Write a story about a narrator trying to understand someone they were once close with, perhaps a sibling, friend, or lover. What image do they want to believe? What truths remain unseen?

Many poems are written in the heat of falling in love with someone or something, with descriptions of desire, first touches, and breathless beginnings. But what happens after the crescendo when routine replaces urgency, when glances no longer surprise, and when love becomes less about being seen and more about staying? Write a poem about what it feels like to love someone or something after the rush. You could write about a partner, a city, a craft, or a version of yourself. Focus on the quiet gestures, the dailiness, and the things you no longer say out loud. How does love change when it no longer needs to perform?

What might someone whom you’ve just encountered for the first time never guess about you? What do you think your loved ones associate most with you? Consider these questions and write a lyric essay that consists of two parts: a speculative section with your own musings about how your outward appearance or demeanor might drive people to assume certain characteristics about you, and how those expectations might be subverted. And a second part in which you either choose one person who knows you well and consider the ways they would describe your most distinctive propensities, or meditate on a number of people who are close to you and create a chorus of their lasting impressions of you. Do these two parts make a whole?

Literature has a long history of narratives that are built around fictionalized letters and correspondence—Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther from the eighteenth century, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the nineteenth century, and more contemporary novels such as Stephen King’s Carrie, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. This week compose an epistolary short story incorporating letters, postcards, e-mails, texts, social media posts, news articles, receipts, and other tidbits of written documents. How do these disparate elements work together to create a story that has to be puzzled together?