Formats
A format is a shape that has already decided part of what belongs in it.
It has also decided part of what it will not hold. What goes in is yours. The rules come with the shape. Each one is written down: a page at most, plain text, free. They name no course and no year.
A brief can be a format. An interview is a format. A monologue is a format.
Where a format carries a view of mine, the view is marked and set apart from the rules around it. Those blocks are not part of the format. Take the rules and leave them, or argue with them; either way what is left works.
Searches the rules inside every format. Runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.
A key, in seven lines
The words beside a number, written before the number exists. Its last line names who and what the number cannot hear.
An articulation, in three passes
Say the same thing again, three times, weeks apart, each time as things somebody does. What repeats is what you meant; the rest was phrasing.
An objective, in seven lines
For when you do not know what the thing is. Seven lines from a situation to the sentence a specification begins with.
A rejected alternative, in six lines
The obvious thing you did not do. Reasons most-fatal-first, and an ending that names what no argument settles.
An outside, in five lines
Something that owes you nothing and can refuse you. One test: a sentence you did not expect and did not want.
Reading for silence, in two passes
Read a text for what it says, then for what it never treats as a question. Then ask it of your own argument.
A routine, in three moves
Record a procedure by hand three times before any code is written. What repeats is the routine; the rest is you.
A scaffold, in seven lines
A starting substrate with the topic, the motivation and the method deliberately left out. Taking it unaltered declines it.
A borrowed character, in six lines
Everybody arrives as somebody else's invention. You know who you wrote; you do not know who wrote you.
A trace, in three marks
Three marks about your own presence after an encounter. When nothing registered, nothing is written.