Automatic Writing

A prompt inspired by the surrealists

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

Prompt 31. Automatic Writing

We talk a lot about things being surreal these days. We see a vacant city street and boarded-up storefronts and say, How surreal. And though we’re not dreaming, it does feel that way—like we’re wedged somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious, grasping to make sense of the change.

It’s interesting to note that the Surrealist movement started in Paris in the 1920s, just after Europe had been wrecked by the First World War and—a significant parallel—the 1918 influenza pandemic. It feels fitting, then, to hearken back to the surrealists and a game they called “Automatic Writing.” It was a way of using play to slip out of the rational mind and into pure dreamstate, believed to be creativity’s most fertile terrain.

Your prompt for the day:

The rules of Automatic Writing are as simple as they come: Just let the words pour from your pen, without restraint, without a goal, without self-editing (oh, how we self-edit!). Abandon any concern for punctuation, logic, structure. Just set a timer—we suggest ten minutes—and let it fly.