Setting Limits

When drafting new work, topical prompts almost never work for me as a writer. If you tell me to write about a time I was surprised, my whole life will suddenly roll out before me like a scripted narrative, no surprises to be found. I work better by giving myself constraints, so today I will offer up one of my favorite options that may help you expand your 30/30 drafting possibilities into new territory.

Number Systems

Write about a topic of your choosing, but give yourself one (or all) of the following numerical
constraints:

● each line must be the same number of words or syllables
● generate a random six digit number and then use that pattern to determine how many
lines will be in each stanza of your draft
● Choose a number that is significant to you in some way – the birthday of your first
love, the phone number of your childhood home – and write a poem where each line
contains the same number of words as each digit. Repeat for multiple stanzas (For
example, a birthdate of 2/18/68 would give you a five line stanza with 2 words, one
word, 8 words, 6 words and 8 words per line.)

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Donna Vorreyer is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Unrivered ( 2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Harpur Palate, Baltimore Review, Salamander, and many other journals. Donna lives in the western suburbs of Chicago and runs the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey. She is the co-founder/co-editor of Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.