" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

For those of you who are unfa­mil­iar, the exquis­ite corpse is a par­lor game invented by sur­re­al­ist André Bre­ton. He and his wacky sur­re­al­ist friends would get together and make a piece of art using col­lage. Each per­son worked on the piece one at a time until it was fin­ished. But there was a trick: each artist would cover all but a por­tion of their sec­tion before pass­ing it to the next con­trib­u­tor. Even artists get stuck, and this was a great way to stretch the cre­ative mus­cles while also cre­at­ing a process document.

This trans­lates very well to writ­ing and I often use it as my own game of writ­ing soli­taire. If I find myself stuck, I’ll copy a line or two of text from the end of a para­graph into a new Scrivener doc­u­ment and just start writ­ing from there. It doesn’t have to fit with the rest of the chap­ter, some­times it’s just a foot­note, but it keeps me mov­ing along.