You inadvertently send your My Little Pony/The West Wing fan fiction to the New Yorker. If your reaction was a New Yorker cartoon, what would it look like? Would it involve dogs?
At a writing conference, you attend an “Empowering Women Writers” discussion panel but when you arrive it is composed entirely of men. Describe, in detail, how you would burn this motherfucker down.
You sign off your pitch email to the Atlantic with “Love you!” because you’ve been emailing your spouse all morning about groceries and that meeting you had with your kid’s teacher because she will only respond when addressed as “The Dark One” and you forgot who you were writing to. Bang your head on your desk and describe the colors and images you see.
The 1,000 word essay about “media pivoting to video” your editor expects is now pushing 3,500 words and has veered into a rant about how MTV was better when they just played music videos and, holy shit, there were 32 seasons of The Real World? Write a letter to yourself about how no one can comprehend the depths of your creative mind.
Your meticulously researched and fact-checked book about the history of the Federal Reserve is deemed “outlandish” in a review. What kind of animal do you sound like when you scream?
When you begin the second draft of your 170,000 word novel you realize there are multiple plot-holes and you’ve killed off your most compelling character by chapter three in an unfortunate ham-slicing incident. Write a poem about despair in the vein of Edgar Allen Poe.
A month after you get a rejection from a prestigious magazine you see an article on the same topic you pitched, using the same sources, written by an in-house writer. The article wins awards. Describe the hex you place on the magazine.
When you arrive at your first reading event on your book tour, there are only two people in the audience. One recently took LSD and thinks he is at Burning Man; the other is your spouse. Write a short story about an alternate universe where you give a reading but you are Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.
All of your Submittable submissions suddenly revert back from “In-Progress” to “Received.” Write a few paragraphs about the endless black void that is now your life.
That dude from your MFA cohort who argued much of modern writing was mere navel-gazing and called your work “too intimate” during workshop asks you to write a blurb for his self-published, stream of consciousness memoir about his unrequited high school crush. Write a lyric essay about that one time you laughed so hard you thought you might actually die.