I started with the following rules:
- Must be written at my kitchen table.
- Must begin with the specific things that lie before me.
- Must regard nothing as unworthy of consideration.
- Must take shape as a single prose paragraph.
- Must write 100 altogether (although I have now written 101 because of the full moon which appeared on day 50).
This quickly led to more rules:
- Must begin with no sense of what will be written.
- Must each be eleven lines long when displayed on my blog (this means in practice that they must be between 145 and 190 words long). [The 101st is an exception. It is twelve lines long.]
- Must be completed in a single sitting. No false starts permitted.
- Must not stray from the table unless the table permits me to stray.
- Must write an average of at least two per day.
[I must confess that there were a few, additional, privately determined rules. I will make no effort to describe them here. Very briefly, they indicated the ultimate failure of all my perverse efforts at communication and silence.]