Classifying a chaos
The list · 15 minutes · Published
Read this first
Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow. It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). Project Gutenberg #2701
The prompt
Announce that you are about to classify a chaos, your family, your street, the contents of a drawer, and then do it, species by species, each entry under the same heading shape: a name, a size, a single telling habit. Go on past the point where it is funny. The list should end up saying what you think of the whole, without your saying it.
Set a timer for 15 minutes.
Short version · 10 minutes
In ten minutes, classify one chaos in ten entries, same shape each: name, size, one habit.
The move
The list. Line up brief items under one formula (memories, names, questions) and let the list run long.
Tags: memory, rhythm and structure.
In a group
A way to run it with a writing group:
The group's text. Each writes alone and reads to the group. Then the group composes a new text from words taken from one another.
Where the page goes next
Scrin is a home where pages grow into books: you keep writing, from an untitled line to a chapter, and Scrin keeps the rest.