Of course I sent out an UNFINISHED DRAFT on the last-last day of 28 x 20.

The truth is, the buck stops with me. All the phone lines are lit up and all 26 of my perso…

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Today, we’ve got Samantha Irby, Ross Gay, Didion again, and more. This is a prompt that might inspire you to push back the timer and sit with the writing a little longer. Go for 20 minutes first, then check in, see where you’re at. If you only (“only”) write down one sentence, that’s more than the blank page you started with.

There will be a big wrap-up post tomorrow.

Let’s do it.

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Remember when I shared seven PUPS? That was 21 days ago. Today, you get nine new ones. Brief refresher if you need it:

There’s usually a day near the end of my in-person workshops when I gather a ton of short prompts, put them on strips of paper, and place them in a coffee cup in the center of the table. I used to call it “prompts in a cup,” until someone way sharper than me said we should call it PUPS.

PUPS are miniature. There’s no accompanying reading to serve as a way into the prompt; each one is a simple directive in one succinct sentence. The stories they yield might not be so simple. That part’s really up to you. The prompts are meant to jog a memory, give you an image, but what you come up with on the page is a matter of letting the creative mind take you where it wants to go. Staying open. Being curious. Not worrying about anything. Just for right now.

Don’t waste precious time trying to decide which one you like the most. Do the one that nudges you.

Let’s get it.

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As a little baby child I had such a severe case of buckteeth that when I entered a room, my incisors walked in first. By 7th grade, I had retainers, braces, more retainers. I didn’t do well with any of it, except for the love of the absolute greatest orthodontist named Morton Speck who had Archie comic books in the waiting area and a totally unique approach, cultivating for his patients (all kids) a kind of solidarity, like an afterschool community. But barring his compassion, the trouble I got into at home every time I accidentally left my retainer in a restaurant was too traumatizing to handle. I’m no longer Bucktooth, but my teeth are as crooked, messy, and foolish as our former mayor, Eric Adams. Truly. It’s like if you had arthritic bunions and a bunch of hammertoes, but in your mouth. Bad teeth are a family curse — mostly on my mother’s side — but I made it worse as a child with my thumb-sucking habit. My denticles never fully recovered. I loathe to think Dr. Speck might have rolled over in his grave.

I weaned myself off of sucking my thumb by the time I was in first or second grade. So it could have been worse, I guess? I imagine I accomplished this feat by tucking my thumb under whenever I felt the urge to suck on it, or whenever I was urged by my mother to get my thumb out of my mouth. I didn’t even realize my thumb tucks itself under/in until maybe a decade ago. I’m like 100 years old — how I never noticed it before is anybody’s guess.

The point of the story is I was a child with a thumb-sucking habit who became an adult with a thumb-tucking habit. And that is weird, and probably all my mother’s fault. To be clear and sure, I have zero impulse to suck my thumb. But muscle memory is real. Maybe even meant to soothe.

Let’s write, bitches.

*The thumb isn’t a finger and everybody knows it.

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It’s Day 24. I am feeling very emotional about Punch, all the news is terrible, we’re having a blizzard here, and everybody’s f***ing had it. It’s been 2026 for so long. Worst of all, I forgot to give you this prompt on Valiumtimes Day — probably because of all the gd valium.

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Today’s prompt is another one I return to often in my own work, though I’m not always conscious of it. It’s a great way into writing about a real person, vitally exploring who they are in the world, and who they are to us — and, harder still, translating that onto the page with clear imagery, and in a way that reveals as much about the other person as it does about you, the narrator. It’s great too, for when you know you need to write about someone, but you’re stuck on “figuring out how.”

Got it? Let’s go.

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Hey, are you collecting all of your 28 x 20 writing in one place? Do that. And don’t look at any of it until we get to the end.

Speaking of which, in On Writing Well, William Zinsser suggests this system for daily writing and building a long-form project. Something to think about come March 1st.

But your inspiration for Day 20 is a passage from an essay by playwright Marlina González, penned for How Dare We Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse.

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Anyway, today we’re thinking about surprise sweetness.

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Come through for blocked-out creative focus time. No prompts, no chatter. Everyone on mute. Dopamine hits in the chat encouraged. Work on whatever’s calling you. Drop in anytime, stay as long as you can. [ Get the link ]

WELCOME BACK and hello new subscribers. Good to have you all here.

Day 19 is Hermit Crab Essay Day. The hermit crab essay is a form of personal narrative that folds itself into another form. Think: a story wrapped in the protective shell of a recipe, a resume, a report card, medical records, a rejection letter, a menu, an insurance claim, prescription labels… I could go on. A dictionary. It’s a slippery slope once I start making lists of things. Instructions for a board game. The hermit crab essay intrinsically unfolds into something sort of fictional, making it a hybrid form of lyrical nonfiction. Train schedule. It’s often used as a way to approach challenging stories with humor. Mad Libs. That levity emerges in an organic relationship with the structure, as long as we’re not trying to shoehorn an idea into an ill-fitting shell. As you can see, dating profile, the possibilities are pretty endless. How-To. It’s creative nonfiction told through something familiar, but unexpected. Bingo.

Read some examples below, and then write your heart out.

But first, your daily practical guidance:

1. Put your phone out of reach and/or on Do Not Disturb.

2. The 20-minute timer is key. Keeps your head in the writing and mitigates overwriting. It’s “enough time to enter the cave and come back out relatively unscathed.”

3. Aim for 150 - 800 words, but don’t let the word count derail you.

4. Start anywhere. Start with your first thought.

5. Keep your hand moving.

6. If you get stuck. Relax your shoulders. Stretch. Take a breath.

7. If you feel like you can’t go any further, keep going.

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I.

When I was three or four, a couple of years before my parents split up, we lived in a brown house with a dog named Bandito who we brought back from Mexico. Then we found two stray kittens, one black and one white (ha, symbolism), and took them in. When I was a bit older, by which I mean maybe seven, I asked whatever happened to Bandito and the kittens. My dad, or maybe my mom, told me that one day they just ran away.

For some time, I had this memory of seeing Bandito casually strolling up the driveway one afternoon, the kittens toddling alongside him. They just kept going until they disappeared into the woods, never to return. But when I say I had this memory, what I really mean is that, at some point, I remembered having had that memory, and then I wondered if it was real or a product of my vigorous inner life. It’s pretty romantic, a dog and two kittens up and deciding there had to be a better life out there somewhere. Who had the idea first?

II.

After my parents split, I had two houses that I was shuttled to and from every week. At my dad’s, I had a corner bedroom at the front on the first floor. My bed sat under the window that looked across the long gravel driveway with a full view of the street. When it was dark and I couldn’t sleep, I’d watch the way the moon drifted between the cheap plastic blinds, casting its own light across my wall. I’m not sure how old I was when I realized that the moonlight was in fact the same light that came from the streetlamp on the edge of the sidewalk at the top of the driveway. But there was a whispery comfort in the light, and it felt like the moon, so there were times where I’d forget it wasn’t. As long as you weren’t looking directly out the window, you’d never know the difference. I knew it was the streetlamp, but I decided to believe it was the moon. Even when I’d come home from college, and after I moved to Brooklyn. Even five or six years ago, before the room was made uninhabitable, and my dad was just a little less sick than he was when he died.

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In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes, “from the second you choose one event over another, you’re shaping the past’s meaning.” This is one of the ways we manipulate time in personal narrative. Today, instead of choosing one event over another, we’re going to explore primary and secondary events — one time, two stories.

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To lift a description by David S. Wallace in The New Yorker:

[I Remember is] a mixture of sense memory, adolescent embarrassment, nostalgic fashions and foods, daydreams, and anything else that falls through the sieve of Brainard’s disarmingly casual syntax. Some are whimsical. Many are sexual, looking back ruefully on the desires Brainard felt before he understood himself as a gay man. Many entries strike a delicate balance between naïve and philosophical (“I remember wishing I knew then what I know now”).

Wallace adds:

I Remember is both a portrait of a period — mid-century America, outwardly self-confident but roiling with sexual misgivings and racial tensions — and a self-portrait, and it’s Brainard’s receptivity that creates an open channel between the two.

Brainard's memoir sparked a generative tradition, “I remembers” penned by other authors emerged. The New Yorker calls them imitations, but I think I Remember is a living form, a conversation (it makes me think of The Golden Shovel, a form of poetry created by Terence Hayes in honor of Gwendolyn Brooks).

Enter Shane Allison, born three decades after Brainard (who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1994). He is also a poet and visual artist, and a black gay man enamored with Brainard’s body of work. Allison wrote an unflinching I Remember in 2012, followed by a chapbook called Remember Men, which follows the same structure except each memory begins with “him” or “his.”

Here’s some Brainard and some Allison for you. I bet you can guess what comes after that.

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I want to say that today’s prompt is about ways of seeing, but that’s dumb because aren’t they all?

In On Photography, Susan Sontag said that when we hear about something that happened to someone somewhere, we tend to think, photos or it didn’t happen. She said that long before the advent of Disgracebook and Instagram. Sontag also pointed out that no one takes the same picture of the same thing. Does this remind you of anything? As creative nonfiction writers, are we telling the truth about a moment, an event, a conversation if someone else remembers it in a whole different way? Where do we find truth in storytelling?

I love today’s prompt a whole lot. I love it in a very personal way, and for the way it emerged directly from my own writing practice. And I love it because it always yields interesting results in workshops. That’s my humble brag. It’s a prompt that’s developed and evolved over a long period of time (last summer marked my 10th year of teaching — another humble brag). This thing has five parts total (so far), and it’s a little different every time. Which parts I use at one time depends on where I’m using it, and why, and, of course, how much time we’ve got. For 28 x 20, we’ll do this in two parts.

If you tell me this prompt doesn’t do anything for you, that’s just bullshit. I don’t even want to hear it. I’m kidding. I do, actually, want to hear it.

LET’S GO.

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ICYMI, there was a question in the comments last week about using a timer for these prompts. The question was, “What are the rules for writing past 20 minutes? Do we continue or stop?”

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COLSON WHITEHEAD:

The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone. It saw you steeling yourself for the job interview, slowly walking home after the late date, tripping over nonexistent impediments on the sidewalk. It saw you wince when the single frigid drop fell from the air-conditioner 12 stories up and zapped you. It saw the bewilderment on your face as you stepped out of the stolen matinee, incredulous that there was still daylight after such a long movie. It saw you half-running up the street after you got the keys to your first apartment. It saw all that. Remembers too.

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