“If you want something alive, try this, too: write ten, ten-minute timed writings about your father during a week’s time. The crazier the better. And if your mind goes to onions, trucks, ocean, straws, black shoes, don’t fight it. Follow that trail. See where it leads. What seems illogical often can take you to deeper, more fertile ground about your father. Also don’t worry if you repeat yourself.” (Natalie Goldberg, The True Secret of Writing)
Writing Exercise: Following the Illogical Thread — Prompting the Unconscious into Character Depth
Key Techniques:
Associative Discovery – Letting unconscious logic generate surprising links between thoughts, images, and memories. Repetition as Psychological Excavation – Returning to the same idea or image to uncover deeper emotional significance. Disrupted Structure for Emotional Truth – Letting disjunctions, digressions, and thematic collisions replace tidy narrative arcs.
Writing Prompt (500 words):
Write a monologue in the voice of a character speaking about someone central to their emotional life—a parent, sibling, former lover, rival, or ghost. Begin with a tangible detail: a gesture, object, or scent tied to that person. Then let the character drift. If their mind jumps to egg yolks, county fairs, ice, burnt toast—follow it. Don’t outline or plan; follow each new thought as if you’re chasing a nervous animal.
Work toward five associative leaps—abrupt changes in topic that still feel emotionally tethered to the central figure. Repetition is allowed. In fact, repeat one image or phrase at least three times, each with a different emotional tone or implication. Let the voice unravel or intensify. End the monologue far from where it began—emotionally, thematically, spatially.
Evaluation Criteria:
Emotional Unpredictability: Strong responses surprise through their emotional turns and contradictions. Weak responses resolve too quickly or stay emotionally flat. Voice as Discovery: The voice feels unfiltered yet specific—like the character is discovering the story while telling it. Weak responses sound overly composed or authorially imposed. Resonant Repetition: Repetitions function as emotional barometers, not verbal tics. Weak responses either avoid repetition or use it mechanically. Vivid, Odd Specificity: Strong writing evokes with off-kilter images that feel intimate. Weak writing leans on generalities, familiar metaphors, or sentimentality.
Follow-up Questions for Workshopping/Revision:
Where does the character seem to lose control of the narrative—in a way that feels revealing rather than chaotic? Which associative leap feels most charged? Which feels decorative or tangential? What does the repetition do—does it gain power, shift meaning, or flatten out? Does the monologue end in a different emotional register than it began? Should it?
Recommended Reading:
“A Small Good Thing” by Raymond Carver (from Cathedral)
This story uses repetition and emotional drift within its stripped-down prose. The central grief spirals through ordinary interactions—cake orders, phone calls, broken conversations. Carver allows repetition to accumulate resonance and strangeness, and emotional logic slowly overtakes plot logic. It’s a story about what can’t be said, but keeps being circled.
Examples:
Strong response excerpt:
“She always chewed the ends of her sleeves. Even in the summer. Even at the funeral, I think. I don’t know why that keeps coming back. Maybe because it reminded me of the dog we had that chewed the couch—ate the whole arm off, one thread at a time. She said once that some people dissolve things slowly instead of breaking them. I didn’t know she meant herself.”
Weak response excerpt:
“My mother was very caring. She made dinner every night and took care of us when we were sick. I remember her smile and how she always told me things would be okay. She died of cancer when I was in college. I miss her and think about her every day.”
The strong response embraces image-driven emotional logic, lets the memory fragment and reform, and ends on an unsettling truth. The weak one relies on direct exposition, avoids complication, and tells without discovery.
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