In her debut memoir, Everything I Know About Love (Penguin Books, 2018), Dolly Alderton recounts her twenties through the lens of friendship, romantic confusion, and the gradual shedding of illusions. Along the way, she questions the stories she grew up believing about what love should look like, how adulthood should feel, and what it means to be fulfilled. “I blame my high expectations for love on two things: the first is that I am the child of parents who are almost embarrassingly infatuated with each other; the second is the films I watched in my formative years,” writes Alderton. Write about an expectation you inherited about love, success, marriage, adulthood, or happiness. Who set that expectation and how did it take root? Describe a moment when reality didn’t live up to your expectations and how this shifted your understanding of what you truly want.

Choose an ordinary setting for a new story: a laundromat, a corner store, a waiting room, a kitchen table. Treat this place not just as background, but as an active force in the lives of your characters. Think about how your characters encounter and become one with this space. How are the lighting choices, particular sounds, and the rhythm of people and objects a factor in shaping the emotions of those who inhabit them? What hidden meaning emerges when you linger on what first seems mundane?

Write a poem that begins with directions you cannot give, whether it’s returning to a childhood home that no longer exists, finding someone you’ve lost, or reaching a place that has only ever appeared to you in dreams. Let the poem move between the literal and the imagined, charting not only streets and landscapes, but also memories, misdirections, and silences. What landmarks have shifted? What details remain sharp? Allow the act of mapping to reveal both presence and absence, and bring the reader in on what it feels like to be in the place you want to bring them.

How has community served you? Whether literary community or a community found through hobbies and activities, or racial, ethnic, cultural, gender, and sexual identities, there are many ways in which these communities provide the support and resources missing from one’s life. In Parul Sehgal’s recent interview with Sarah Schulman published in the Paris Review’s Art of Nonfiction series, she says: “My whole life has taken place in community, in the gay community. Community saved my life. It’s the official structures, family and all that, that have been my problem.” Write a personal essay that explores various communities you participate in. Compare and contrast what you have found valuable in them versus the social and institutional structures imposed upon you via family, government, economy, education, and religion. With whom has your life taken place?

A study published last year in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presented surprising findings about a population of dark-eyed juncos living in Los Angeles. The normally forest-dwelling sparrows whose physical traits had diverged from their wilder counterparts to suit their urban lifestyle, had beaks that reverted to their wildland shapes during pandemic lockdown restrictions when their immediate environments had fewer humans in them. Think about the environmental shifts that transpired in the early 2020s due to the pandemic and write a short story that revolves around a physical adaptation or transformation that occurred naturally over the course of those years due to changed habits. Experiment with incorporating elements of science fiction, humor, and surrealism into your story. Who takes notice of these changes?

Poet and novelist Stacy Skolnik pieced together a series of Facebook posts from her old high school friend Robert Frost into a collaborative hybrid poetry collection, which is forthcoming from Book Works in June. In one of the collection's poems, the speaker expounds a moment of frustration after reading the signage outside a shopping area: “Can you believe this notice / in the middle of a seating and dining porch / it’s literally made for loitering // We have this seating area but NO ONE CAN USE IT!!!” Taking inspiration from themes that this poem touches upon—class, productivity, propriety—compose a poem of your own that meditates on what it means to loiter, which Merriam-Webster defines as “to remain in an area for no obvious reason.” What judgments do you make when you notice someone who appears to be loitering?

“I told a friend that I had missed a flight to Europe (again) and she assured me that it was just my ‘queer relationship to temporality.’ I did not really know what that meant, but I liked the sound of it,” writes Stephanie Wambugu in her essay “Running Behind,” a meditation on her relationship with lateness and punctuality, recently published by Granta magazine. Consider your own habits of showing up early, on time, or late to meetings, appointments, shared meals, and other assignations. Wambugu writes that on one occasion, her lateness was “an act of passive resistance” and “an expression of my disdain.” How would you characterize your priorities when you arrive late? How might your relationship to temporality be based on how you were raised or your intentions to subvert certain cultural norms?

Jacaranda trees, whose abundant violet-colored flowers dominate the streets of Los Angeles from late spring through early summer, have bloomed about a month earlier this year due to an unexpected heat wave in March. The trees have filled the city with large swaths of purple, both on the tree canopies and sprinkling carpets of blooms when they fall. Think of a sign in your local environment that annually signals a change from spring to summer and write a story that takes place against the backdrop of this seasonal indicator occurring earlier than usual. Experiment with how this subtle or explicit phenomenon in the natural environment can be expressed through various sensory details. How does this occurrence create a sense of tension in relation to the plot arc and character development of your narrative? Do your characters take notice of this anomaly or is it simply playing out in the background?

Fady Joudah, winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, writes that he thought about how animals process trauma without speaking and how “intifada deserves a good rhyme” when composing his poem “Pink Panther,” recently published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. The poem concludes with the stanza: “See cicada or when home is a howling / intifada. Your heart, utterly flexible, / a wind like water, / the stubborn wind.” This week, begin by creating a short list of words or phrases that you find yourself circling around in your work, perhaps indicative of themes at the forefront of your thoughts. Then, select one term that is particularly difficult to rhyme. Challenge yourself to think of rhyming words and ways to connect the terms, even if far-fetched. Build your poem around this innovative and unexpected rhyme pairing.

“When you mention music, you want that music to do the atmosphere work for you. But it’s really tricky,” says Sophie Strohmeier about linking music, compositions, and instruments to the characters in her novella All Girls Be Mine Alone (Joyland Publishing, 2025), in an interview for the Creative Independent. “It was more like creating a material palette with the evocation of what each instrument might convey.” Focus on infusing a scene in either a new personal essay or a work-in-progress with music. Allow the music to do the work of adding a fresh dimension to the atmosphere and recollection of your memories. You might recall the types of songs that would have been playing in your setting or brainstorm the sounds and instruments that most effectively convey the mindset or emotions of the people present in your retelling.