Why the Best Writing Advice Is Often the Weirdest

In a talk on the “art of rough drafting,” George Saunders, the Phil Jackson of writing teachers, says he’s learned, through writing and revision, that “there is a mind greater than the one I’m talking to you with right now . . . and it’s smarter than me.” In my coaching sessions, I try to help a writer reach this smarter, intuitive mind. As much as I admire Davis’s exhortations to work on one’s character—and I do return to them—they point toward what an aspiring writer can become someday rather than the move they usually need to make in the moment.

In an interview with the website Public Parking, the writer Lucy Ives describes ad-libbing a writing exercise to kill an awkward classroom silence. After leading her students through a couple of bluffed warmup prompts, she asked them to “describe something that they’d completely forgotten.” As she explained, “I wanted it to be impossible to do the exercise ‘correctly.’ ”

Ives’s new book, “three six five: prompts, acts, divinations (an inexhaustible compendium for writing),” is built around the premise that an exercise succeeds when there is no right answer. “How to walk backward” begins: “Write a description of your bed after you have slept in it.” Then, a chair you’ve sat in, a room you’ve left, a glass you’ve drunk from, a person you no longer know, a belief you no longer hold; each instruction receding a little further until you’re trying to see “something so far out of sight that it cannot be seen.” I tried this prompt and snagged on my own incomprehension. Knowing Ives’s work, I suspected this was the point. I can’t say I enjoyed the feeling, but I did keep going. I wrote about the worn neck pillow on my unmade bed and my iced coffee in a Bonne Maman jar. It felt dutiful and boring. Then I stopped trying so hard, and the protagonist of my novel came into focus. The exercise concludes: “Turn towards the now-invisible place from whence you came. Wave slowly.” As someone who has tried more than my share of silly writing prompts, I’m annoyed when this kind of thing succeeds—and it did. I wrote a scene I’d been avoiding.

“Three six five” continues a project Ives has been pursuing for years. Within a sprawling œuvre—more than a dozen books of poetry, fiction, and essays—the act of writing itself is often the main character. As she put it in a Granta interview: “narratives are always tied to and emerging from other narratives.” Her books resemble metafictional mises en abyme, stories within stories within stories not unlike the mini-narratives that make “three six five” appealing as both a guide and a work of literature in its own right. Since her 2009 début, the poetry chapbook “My Thousand Novel,” she’s taken on, among other things, fake Wikipedia entries, an abecedarian essay, and a #MeToo systems novel, “Life Is Everywhere,” in which the story detours through several texts in the main character’s bag.

Ives’s 2019 novel, “Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World,” is set at the Seminars, a backbiting M.F.A. program that is a fictional version of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—Ives’s alma mater. The book follows Harry, an introverted poet, and Troy Augustus Loudermilk, a handsome blowhard who pretends in workshop that he wrote Harry’s poems. The book is one of the funnier portrayals of a writing program. (A sample line: “Harry is reawakened by the sensation of something stiff and damp prodding his face.” It’s a Sharpie.) But it’s also an earnest inquiry into the social forces behind writing education and the romantic notion of “genius” that sustains it. At one point, Marta Hillary, the Seminars’ star faculty member, describes what writing is to Loudermilk, saying, “We’re here to . . . confront the fact that, as humans, we are fated to make things, and we are, meanwhile, the subjects of history.” We can’t produce words without being subject to the hostile systems that produce us in turn. Loudermilk, of course, misses the point of this monologue.