I always loved Swink’s “Damaged Darlings.” Described as “an exercise in literary genetics whereby two fiction writers work collaboratively in a specific manner: the first offers a work-in-progress he or she has neglected for some time but still treasures; the second is brought on to take the blemished but beloved narrative and transform it into something new and more complete.” They published these collaborations in each of their three print issues, and they’re still my favorite stories in the magazine. In Newpages.com, Weston Cutter said of the “Damaged Darlings” in Swink 1, “The results are fucking brilliant, to be blunt, and both stories within, David Hollander and Nelly Reifler’s ‘Whatever We Were Beforehand’ and Amy Bloom and Chris Offutt’s ‘I Was Dancin’ with My Darlin’’ work as stories, as mysteries (which author wrote what?), as strange and beautiful harmonies.”

I have a handful of stories that I can’t finish, but I don’t want to trash them and I don’t want to strip out all the “good parts” and fit them into other stories, or (God forbid) try to turn them into poems. Why can’t I finish these particular stories? They often seem to be the ones in which I’m trying to follow the trajectory of what actually happened instead of allowing a nonfictional experience to spark a fictional story. How awesome would it be to have a writer who had no idea what had actually happened, or who these characters were, take over? Better yet, how about one of your favorite writers?

Psychological tests are very weird and typically rely on verbal interpretation, two attributes that comprise a good writing exercise.

Rarely do products of writing exercises become anything substantial. Perhaps a line, an idea that can be expanded, but on the whole they are what they are: exercises. Practice. Necessary when you're not performing, creating, inspiring yourself. At their best, these psychological tests as writing exercises get your brain going crazy, which allows you to do something new, which is what you want, isn't it?

The image above is a Rorschach "ink blot." How it works: ink is dripped onto a sheet and reflected when the sheet is folded. These are all symmetrical images, and the patient is to interpret what the abstract ink blots are. So if you say, It looks like a butterfly, then you're free to go. If you say, It reminds of the twisted monster in my demented heart, then you're likely not free to go. To use this as a writing exercise, simply list everything the image could be; then everywhere the "thing" could be; then everything the thing could be doing; then all the inner feelings of the thing. This creates possibles. Just possibles. And you created all of them. If none of these possibles is truly striking, at least your brain is being creative out of thin air. It jumpstarts the creative half. This

One technique I've found useful in revising is coming up with one word that my story is about in an effort to find a center. For instance, say I finally realize that the story I've been trying to wrangle for months is about "hope." Great. Then I ask myself, Does the main character lose hope or gain hope? (Normally, they will abandon all hope in my stories.) Then, I have some sort of idea that the story begins with a scene that demonstrates hope, then contains more scenes with emblems or messages of "anti-hope," and finally ends with a loss of hope. Thinking in really simple terms like this helps me see where I'm going more clearly. "How does this scene communicate 'anti-hope'?" I can ask myself. "Is the half-eaten donut an emblem of anti-hope?" You get the idea.

This might seem somewhat simplistic, but when I'm writing around in circles, unsure of what I want to say or why I'm writing the story or what the story even is, this has helped. I find if I just try to write something that I hope my audience finds interesting, sometimes it devolves into something scandalous or shocking, and then, after a while, it just feels like US Weekly (which has its delights, but that's not the effect I'm going for). It also, generally, gets me nowhere, because I am really concerned with plot and quirkiness and cleverness and not concerned with what the story means. In a story, infidelity for the sake of titillation is boring, but infidelity as "anti-hope," or whatever, just might work.