Personal Universe Deck
Create your own deck of personalized association cards to spark your writing:
On a piece of paper write as many words as you can.
Sort the words into categories:
- 16 words of each of the 5 senses (80 words in all). Words that evoke a sense to you. They can be poetic like “birdsong” for hearing, “dessicated” for touch.
- 10 words of motion. Not necessarily verbs! Just words that to you bring feelings of motion, like wind, race car.
- 3 abstractions. Love, freedom, truth …
- 7 anything else.
- significance to you
- be specific (eg, robin is better than bird.)
- sound good to you. (Did I mention to you enough? ;-))
- No adverbs. (Perhaps to encourage strong verbs. But why allow adjectives? Not sure.)
- No plurals.
Draw words randomly and use them as a story prompt or to create the skeleton of a poem or to spark to a piece that you’re stuck on.
Take out old words and add new words occasionally. You can even recreate the whole deck from scratch every once in a while.
From an exercise by Linnea Johnson in The Practice of Poetry: writing excercises from poets who teach, edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell.
