As a writing experiment, use the prompt I never … to write a list-based piece exploring the inner and outer lives for a main character, starting every sentence with the phrase I never. Write for ten minutes, making this a free write, keeping the pen moving and seeing what comes up; if you find yourself halting or drying up, just write I never … again and let a fresh association surface for your character. Try to include specific and concrete references: project inner feelings on to physical objects, introduce particular settings, make detailed references to other characters, create complications.

I do recommend writing by hand for that organic connection between pen and paper and body and soul. But too sometimes a keyboard works better for some writers – comes naturally. And sometimes we get cramps in our hands, or our writing is slower than our thoughts – though too there’s no harm in slowing down occasionally. Explore, perhaps, and do whatever works for you.

In this instance, think about the choice of the word never, which is often used in contexts related to regret or loss or lack or failings or yearnings on the part of character: super plot drivers. You could even make the nevers a list of blatant denials (lies). What surfaces often goes to the heart of your character’s plottings.

Also: the list form has distinctive effects.

It comes easy, and has a cadence and a rhythm.

It enjoys the simple forward-moving power of the right-branching syntax of everyday speech; variations in the patterning of the sentence can add emphasis and curiosity.

The repetition has a powerful insistence that digs deep into your character’s basic drives, subconsciously drawing on instinct instead of depending on overly thought-out writing.

The list is a straightforward form to write, too – once you run out of something to say about a particular never, you can start a new sentence and find something else. Lean into the scaffolding you have created.

I have posted elsewhere about the particular charge of the list as a form: Variations on the Form of I Remember.

You can also use similar power prompts such as

• I remember …
• I don’t remember …
• I want …
• I don’t want …
• I know …
• I must …
• I should …
• I need …
• I will …
• I can …
  
• If I …
  
• When I …

Some of them (I never, I don’t remember, I don’t want) have a tendency of drawing on darker material – what Natalie Goldberg might says ‘pulls in the shadow’, which as Natalie says can be the real ‘juice’ in writing.

Repeat variations of this exercise for your character on different occasions. Maybe try these for ten minutes every day for a week. Let this character’s urges and insistences inhabit you for the whole week. Then, making this a practice, in following weeks repeat these exercises for other characters. See what surfaces. Then take this material into your story.

You could also do simply for yourself as personal writing that might – or might not – feed another creative project.

This is a useful exercise to carry out as part of your planning or alongside your drafting, or perhaps if you are getting stuck in your writing. It’s helpful with plotting – I used this in a couple of plotting workshops for The Literary Consultancy this week. Such simple prompts can really help with the sorts of primal work that writing often needs, that digging for fossils that Stephen King describes in On Writing.

I also think about Anna Burns talking about her instinctive writing process and discussing it in this interview.

And another powerful use of the list structure is Zoe Leonard’s remarkable I Want A President, which I used recently in a Finding Your Fire workshop for tapping into and expressing our intention in writing. Note the effects of repetition and variation – the emphasis, the accumulations; the POWER.

I always love to hear about those ways into writing that come natural, come easy (well, I should qualify that: we do have to do the work of showing up, which isn’t always easy). Prompts such as these often raise things that nudge our characters into the sorts of situations that make for good plots.

Meanwhile, on an entirely other note: pictures of tulips, above, as it’s already time to think about which ones to order for delivery in the autumn … I think that is Ballerina with, I think, Queen of the Night?