The other day, I picked up Ancient, Ancient, my first short story collection. I thumbed through it and randomly picked a page. I found myself at the end of “Ferret,” a story I wrote in 2003.

This is the segment I read:

Terror welled in my throat, but my mind—making sense of the visions at a feverish pace—quelled my emotions. When I regained focus, I was staring at the marble floor. A palpable hush filled the divining room; everyone stared mutely. I heard a muffled groan behind me. When I twisted around on all fours, I saw grandfather, shriveled into a tiny ball, dying just as his grandfather had. I looked into his eyes searching for a flicker of recognition, hatred, pain, but there was nothing there.

“You…” The condemnation burning in my lungs would not spring from my mouth. Could I blame grandfather for attempting to escape extinction?

“I…” I started to claim ignorance for my actions, but the apology died on my lips.

“How…” I wanted to ask what alternative I’d had, but my need to be proclaimed innocent wilted just as quickly as it sprouted. We passengers were the innocents here. He would starve us, before taking us home. Those visions did not lie.

You can read the rest of the story here.

It reminded me of a time that I was not prejudging what I wrote. But it was also a time that fatigue was rising. I remember at that time, whenever someone asked me for a story, I asked them for six words. I used those words to craft a unique piece of fiction. The words—with no clear pattern—often took me freewheeling into imagination and creativity. (I wrote about this process in a 2001 blog post describing how an editor gave me the six words that inspired Ancient, Ancient, which became the title piece of the collection.)

Turning it into a game helped me not work so hard to come up with a concept. I love puzzles, and that is what the random combination of words offered me. It offered me a puzzle of how to fit those words together in a concept that could unfurl a world.

In writing this post, I am quietly daring myself to go there again. The last story I just wandered through is still sitting on my hard-drive. It has great tension and an interesting storytelling style, but there is no arc. I’m of that rusty age where my willingness to leap is dampening, but I’d love to do some low-stakes writing. I think it might be try to jumble some words again and dive back into chaotic creativity.

Do exercises help you find new possibilities in your craft? May we find fun, engaging tricks to drag us back into our creative well.

Onward,

—K.