“Their romance has started in earnest this summer, but the prologue took up the whole previous year,” writes Susan Choi in the beginning of her 2019 award-winning novel, Trust Exercise, in which two high school freshmen fall in love and experience an intense love affair until they return to their performing arts school the next fall. When other classmates and teachers get involved, the outlines of their burgeoning relationship begin to seem less clear as the realities and complexities of group social dynamics come into play. Write a personal essay that chronicles the subtle or dramatic shifts of a relationship you’ve had in which your dynamic with the other person encountered some sort of transformation when the setting or surroundings of your relationship changed. Did issues of power, control, or social expectations have an effect? What questions arise when considering performance of the self in private versus in public?

Written and directed by Celine Song, Materialists is a film about a matchmaker at a high-end agency in New York City and her own trials of love. She interviews and maneuvers her clients who have very specific demands for their potential dating partners, testing the mechanics of worth and value, and seeing people through the lens of market capitalism. Characters are bluntly forthcoming about age preferences and job salaries, an honesty that may seem surprising when considered against old-fashioned social norms which deem it vulgar to talk about money. Write a story in which one of your characters is uncommonly direct about financial matters—whether about having a lot or a little, or how much they spend, earn, and save. How does bringing money into the picture illuminate issues of class between your characters?

Summer is often a season of extremes with scorching pavement and icy drinks, painful sunburns and soothing shade, chaotic activities and calming stillness. Write a poem that explores the tension or intimacy between extremes. Consider a specific, concrete pairing, such as a cold popsicle melting down your wrist in 100-degree heat or the boisterous laughter at a backyard barbecue countered by the silence of an abandoned porch swing. Focus on how contrast sharpens a sensation and can uncover deeper emotional truths. Try to avoid naming the opposites directly, instead, evoke them through details like textures, temperature, tone, and movement. You might also experiment with form to reflect duality by including couplets or mirrored stanzas.


In Zhang Yueran’s novel Women, Seated, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang and forthcoming in August from Riverhead Books, the protagonist Yu Ling works as a nanny for a wealthy couple and their young son in China, after initially taking on duties assisting in the art studio of her employer, Qin Wen. In a flashback, Yu Ling recalls a remark by Qin Wen about an artist she admires: “Do you know why Alice Neel liked drawing mothers and children so much? It’s because she abandoned her own child.” Compose a pair of short lyrical essays, one that originates from loss and one that begins with a thing achieved or acquired. You might start with your instinctive responses to personal losses and gains, whether physical or more abstract. Do your attendant essays mirror each other or diverge?

“It was all so different than he expected. / For years he’d been agnostic; now he meditated. / For years he’d dreamed of being an artist living abroad; / now he reread Baudelaire, Emerson, Bishop. / He’d never considered marriage … / Still, a force through the green fuse did drive.” So begins Henri Cole’s poem “At Sixty-Five,” which appears in The Other Love, forthcoming in July from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a collection in which Cole reflects on the shifting observations of a person as they age and gain new perspective on the passing of time and the accumulation of memories. Write a short story from the point of view of someone older than you, which begins with the sentence “It was all so different than I expected.” Is your inclination to plot out key milestones in your character’s life before you begin writing or to simply see where the character’s meditations take you?

In the essay collection Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and published by New Directions in June, Yoko Tawada explores various aspects of life, communication, and art through a lens of linguistic and cultural hybridity. In “Paris: This Language Which Is Not One,” Tawada writes about a poem by Paul Celan in which the German words for dwindling (Neige) and snow (Schnee) appear in adjacent lines, pointing out that Neige means snow in French. “To me, Celan’s poems have a multilingual structure akin to a magic net that even captures Japanese, a language he never knew,” Tawada notes. Write a poem in which you deploy a “magic net” that allows you the freedom to play with associative, expansive thinking, capturing any basic knowledge of words in other languages or dialects or registers. What unexpected connections can be made?

In award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist Hala Alyan’s debut memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home (Avid Reader Press, 2025), she explores themes of loss and exile in conjunction with her experience preparing for the arrival of a new baby through surrogacy after years of struggling with infertility and miscarriages. While looking forward to the birth of her daughter, Alyan reflects on her family’s history with immigration and her childhood moving around Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, the UAE, Texas, and Oklahoma, and examines the roles of heritage and matriarchal storytelling. Write a personal essay that looks to the role of storytelling in your own family and childhood. What stories were told to you by parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and elders in your community? How are these stories and myths connected to your cultural inheritance and your formation as a writer and storyteller?

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?