This is a public version of a private practice I have had for years.
I use these prompts every morning to start my day.
You’re invited to do the same.
Wednesday, October 7, 2026
If we meet one year from now, what would you be celebrating?
When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder -- that seems to give a kind of background to another's grief, against which it stands out more clearly.
Letter to Lydia Avilova, 1892. Avilova was a writer who sought Chekhov's feedback on her stories; they maintained a complicated correspondence for years. This is Chekhov's most direct statement of the "coldness as technique" principle -- the writer's emotional distance amplifies the reader's emotion.
We answer a series of questions daily to start the day, and to protect it. The questions are there to trigger something. Nothing written on any one day is significant in itself; the value is in the repetition, today and again when today is tomorrow. After a few years I can go back to this day two years ago and know how it played out, and how I am different from that person.