Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey, a new documentary directed by Pippa Ehrlich, who won an Oscar for My Octopus Teacher, chronicles the rescue of a pangolin from wildlife traffickers in South Africa. In one sense, the film is about the progression of a baby pangolin named Kulu who learns skills such as foraging, gains a healthy amount of weight, and heals from his trauma before being set free in the wild. But another rescue enters the story as Gareth Thomas, a middle-aged man with a troubled past, volunteers for a nonprofit pangolin center and finds meaning in his life after spending over a year rehabilitating and eventually letting go of Kulu. Write a short story in which your main character is on a rescue mission and ends up being healed or redeemed in an unexpected way. What are the obstacles along the way that provide moments of comedy, suspense, or pathos?

In the New York Times, a recent headline reads: “Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 200 Times.” Without reading the content of the article, where does this sensational statement take your mind? This could be an act of heroism, foolishness, a desperate cry for attention, or simply one of the many bizarre idiosyncrasies of human behavior. This week, scroll and scan through a range of headlines—whether seemingly legitimate or dubious—and pick a particularly strange one. Before reading the article, write a poem that follows your line of thinking upon seeing this striking bit of reportage. Think about where the story might go and what images are evoked. Are you able to draw a personal connection to aspects of your own behavior that might explain why the headline resonated with you?

In a New Yorker interview about her short story “Marseille,” Ayşegül Savaş comments on a realization she made when putting together her story collection Long Distance, forthcoming from Bloomsbury in July: “Even though friendships are very important to my own life, I would still place marriage, or parents, or children at the center of my preoccupations. Then why do I write so much about friends?” Take a look through some of your past writing and try to locate any patterns of concerns that recur throughout different pieces, thus revealing your thematic priorities. Write an essay that muses on why these are primary concerns for you to explore creatively. How do your subjects influence your writing form and vice versa? Have themes evolved or shifted in big or small ways over the years?

In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2019, guest editor Anthony Doerr lists several dos and don’ts one often hears about writing short stories and describes his love for reading and writing stories that break those very rules. Some of the rules Doerr mentions are: “Don’t start with a character waking up. Jump right into the action. Exposition is boring. Backstory slows you down. Stick with a single protagonist. Make sure he or she is likable. Don’t break up chronology.” This week, think carefully about the reasoning behind one of these oft-cited rules, then write a story that explicitly goes against it. How can the incorporation of an aspect of experimentation or innovation effectively push against the possibly clichéd rationale behind the original rule?