Focus on small lists

Devi Laskar, poet and blog editor at BWW until recently, got many of us started on writing down our favorite 1,000 words, reminding us that we have the tools to rocket our worlds. Many of us, including me, got going, and then in the hullabaloo of the holidays, my list-making got cold.

Recently, I’ve found a way to heat it up again, making the word list whirl: use it to make smaller, more focused lists. You do it culling words from it according to rules you make up:

“Words with ‘k’ sounds,” for example.

“Words from ‘Star Trek’ “could be another.

“Rhyming words” or “Verbs” could be others.

I got this fabulous exercise from Julie Bogart, founder of Brave Writer, a writing website/classroom/curriculum source for kids. This particular exercise is from the Groovy Grammar workshop, given only once a year in January. It is a class for families, parents making lists and pools of words alongside their children. These days, with colds, flu and tooth extractions making time extra scarce, I find that doing these exercises with my daughter rebuilds my inner word-fire — happily, one of the goals I’d set for myself for January.

Last night I made several lists from my master list. My two favorite were “Verbs” and “Words that begin with ‘d’ followed by a soft vowel sound.” My verb list surprised me. As Julie had indicated when talking about how surprising grammar is, I found that many of my verbs also doubled as adjectives and nouns, lending me new possibilities for meaning. And for my “d” list, I found only two and I love them for suggesting worlds of story, “dusty” and “detail.”