Write a “How-To” story, or a story that is in the second-person address. Try to put your speaker in a situation that makes it clear who he or she is, and how he or she feels about the activity or events described. Take full advantage of the form: do not you “you” as a replacement for “he” or “she,” do not just narrate events that have already happened. Ask the reader to participate in the imagination of the story as it shifts and changes. Please write 500-1000 words. You should use strange and inaccessible metaphors in order to sound artsy, and make sure you break down barriers you make with a recklessness of thought and a complexity of diction that makes you sound like some great master of prose. Try to shroud meaning in endless analogies and turns of phrase. Hide your point in the center of a maze; be sure that a simple-minded person can’t navigate it. Make everybody work. You’ll get frustrated, you’ll get writer’s block, and you won’t know what words you ought to write next. You’ll know that what you have to say isn’t worth saying unless you stretch it out, bend it, let it hang out in the wind for a while, take it for a walk, drag it behind your car, play catch with it, wear it out, stretch it some more, geocache it, squeeze it out of an icing tube onto a cake and eat it. Nobody cares about it unless it’s in some strange form, in inaccessible language, drenched in ambiguity and tossed in a good bit of vagueness. Say nothing outright; it doesn’t matter that way. You’ll wonder why and you’ll go for a walk, you’ll want to throw away the dozens of pages you’ve written and say all that you have to say on a piece of hotel notepad paper. However, that is against the rules. Make them search. You’ll stop, you’ll open your door and walk away and go outside and inhale the new air and see the trees and the birds. You’ll talk to people but just look at more and then you’ll understand that it’s not art if you just say it. You’ll go on hikes and road trips and age and wonder why you never just said it. You’ll go on hikes and road trips and age and wonder why you never just said it. You’ll say I should’ve just said it and you did just say it but nobody paid attention because they don’t care about that, because people want to work and work and analyze and uncover things they knew but like to say that they’ve learned as a token of their achievement. Remember, it is allowable that you hide your point in metaphors because you’re scared of it, but mostly, remember that it isn’t art if you just say it. I didn’t.