Excerpted from the essay originally published May 20, 2026. Read the complete essay at The New Yorker. (Also, selected as one of The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2026 So Far”!)

In an interview with the website Public Parking, the writer Lucy Ives describes ad-libbing a writing exercise to kill an awkward classroom silence. After leading her students through a couple of bluffed warmup prompts, she asked them to “describe something that they’d completely forgotten.” As she explained, “I wanted it to be impossible to do the exercise ‘correctly.’ ”

Ives’s new book, “three six five: prompts, acts, divinations (an inexhaustible compendium for writing),” is built around the premise that an exercise succeeds when there is no right answer. “How to walk backward” begins, “Write a description of your bed after you have slept in it.” Then a chair you’ve sat in, a room you’ve left, a glass you’ve drunk from, a person you no longer know, a belief you no longer hold; each instruction receding a little further until you’re trying to see “something so far out of sight that it cannot be seen.” I tried this prompt and snagged on my own incomprehension. Knowing Ives’s work, I suspected this was the point. I can’t say I enjoyed the feeling, but I did keep going. I wrote about the worn neck pillow on my unmade bed and my iced coffee in a Bonne Maman jar. It felt dutiful and boring. Then I stopped trying so hard, and the protagonist of my novel came into focus. The exercise concludes: “Turn towards the now-invisible place from whence you came. Wave slowly.” As someone who has tried more than my share of silly writing prompts, I’m annoyed when this kind of thing succeeds—and it did. I wrote a scene I’d been avoiding.

“Three six five” continues a project Ives has been pursuing for years. Within a sprawling œuvre—more than a dozen books of poetry, fiction, and essays—the act of writing itself is often the main character. As she put it in a Granta interview: “narratives are always tied to and emerging from other narratives.” Her books resemble metafictional mises en abyme, stories within stories within stories not unlike the mini-narratives that make “three six five” appealing as both a guide and a work of literature in its own right. Since her 2009 début, the poetry chapbook “My Thousand Novel,” she’s taken on, among other things, fake Wikipedia entries, an abecedarian essay, and a #MeToo systems novel, “Life Is Everywhere,” in which the story detours through several texts in the main character’s bag…

…“Three six five” falls into this lineage [Julia Cameron’s “much-imitated, spiritually inclined self-help approach to the perils of creativity”], even as it offers a more radical alternative. The book design signals that readers are in for something more expansive and less cringe than “The Artist’s Way.” With its gradient-colored cover—a royal blue that shades into a bright green—dyed page edges, ribbon place markers, and debossed lowercase text, the book resembles a devotional text or a mood ring. Inside, each of the three hundred and sixty-five exercises breathes on its own page. Spindly line drawings by Nick Mauss pop up periodically—surreal figures like a lobster telephone—though they don’t illustrate the text so much as shimmy​ and dream alongside it. The prompts offer tasks ranging from reviewing “an imaginary book,” to repeating a word until it stops making sense. (A punk friend gave Ives this mind-bending idea when she was sixteen.) They are gnomic (“create a circular work”) and ambitious (“write a thirty-page sentence”). If you can pull off that last one, Ives assures us, “you are ready for the big leagues!”

The publisher of “three six five,” Siglio, was founded in 2008 to publish unclassifiable text-image hybrids like Ives’s, which draw on the twentieth-century avant-garde. The book’s clearest precursor is Yoko Ono’s Fluxus-coded “Grapefruit,” from 1964, a compendium of conceptual art instructions that includes intentionally nonsensical prompts such as “imagine one thousand suns in the sky at the same time.” Ono’s husband, John Lennon, later acknowledged “Grapefruit” as the inspiration for his song “Imagine,” and said that Ono deserved a co-writing credit (in 2017, she got it). In a 1971 interview, he said, “I think this is an important book to help people act out their madness. If you do some of the things in it, you stop going crazy in a way.”

Self-doubt and fear have always made writers feel crazy. The material conditions we work in have become more demoralizing, as authors have less time to reach a more distracted audience for little pay. And yet every day writers call me from conference rooms at their day jobs, or cramped kitchens with their children, or cars sitting in their driveways—sometimes the only place quiet enough to think. Ives gets at what draws writers back to the craft when she observes that “the contemporary era is beset with forces who want to convince us that language can be lossless-ly quantified.” The same forces are at work on the people who use the language. Figuring out what you really think is one way of remembering that you’re human…