Clive Thompson made an online tool that shows you only the questions in a piece of writing.
I love it because I love questions and also because it turns everything into Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood.
I fed it the complete text of each book in my trilogy. Here’s Show Your Work!:
And here’s Keep Going:
The results are not only funny, they sort of make great summaries for the books.
You can try the tool here.
For the second year in a row, Sam Anderson and I celebrated Montaigne’s birthday (Feb. 28) by jumping on Instagram Live and chatting about writing and drawing. Tune in to see Sam’s therapy drawings and learn his interviewing tricks and tips. Watch below or on Instagram.
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Here are some light pages from my diary: a record of all the Wordle games our family played together in February.
How we play: the boys (Owen is 9, Jules is 6) get to choose the first word — the weirder or naughtier the better! — and then we all make suggestions until we have it solved.
If you’re playing competitively, against others or your own record, the challenge is to guess the right word in as few steps as possible.
But when we play together, there seems to be a correlation between how many guesses and how much fun we have. The more time it takes the better.
Why would I go to the trouble of recording these in my diary?
I used to feel like a good diary was one in which you wrote down Important Things That Happened To You, but the more I write mine, the more I think it’s the tiny, almost insignificant details, accurately rendered, that bring you back to where you were.
The same way you think the Big Important Rituals are what’s going to matter to your family, when it’s really the small, silly ones you’ll probably remember most fondly…
In this week’s newsletter, I shared these notes for my chat with Sarah Ruhl and how I prepare for an interview.
spiral (verb) 1. to move in the shape of a spiral 2. to continuously become worse, more, or less
I began the month joking that I was just “trying not to spiral out,” and I’m winding down the month by intentionally spiraling out with a new little exercise for my morning pages in my diary.
Here’s how you do it:
1. Set aside 10 minutes and start with a fresh page in your notebook. Follow Lynda Barry’s instructions for drawing a spiral: Start in the very center of the page, and make the tightest spiral you can manage, trying to get the lines as close as you can without touching. (More in her wonderful book, Syllabus, and check out another version over at Wendy MacNaughton’s Draw Together.) You’ll know when you’re done.
2. Once you have your spiral, start annotating it with your feelings and thoughts, everything weighing on you or bothering you. (Wendy calls this “inside weather.”) Catalog what’s on the surface, towards the outside of the spiral, and what’s deep, on the inside.
3. Go about your day.
I can’t claim that it’s solved anything for me, but it has helped me feel a little less anxious, a little more calm.
(See also: “Spin art.”)
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