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Reposted by Arman Chowdhury 🍉

Granta @grantamag.bsky.social · 8h

From the archive, 1989: fiction by John Updike.

‘David Kern, in these three days, had felt himself become pulplike – shapeless, lost and swallowed.’

granta.com/the-lens-fac...

The Lens Factory | John Updike | Granta Magazine

‘It made him feel lopsided, this sense of being plucked at by nervousness and dread.’ Fiction from John Updike for Granta 28: Birthday Special.

granta.com

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 10h

…diversity and inclusion. How can you use close, sensory detail to make its alienation feel ordinary? What kind of voice can capture both resignation and quiet defiance? How does assimilation erode the self it is trying to save?

#writingprompt #writersky #monster #assimilation #inclusion

Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 10h

…The landlord refuses to fix its leaking ceiling because “you people are used to damp.” Co-workers ask if it’s comfortable in daylight. Dating apps flag its selfies as inappropriate content. Still, it keeps trying by learning small talk, filing taxes, attending HR workshops on…

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 10h

Daily writing prompt #90:

Write a story about a monster who has spent years trying to blend into human society. It has a steady job, an apartment, and a gym membership, but its difference shows up in ways no disguise can hide. Its fingerprints never scan right at the office…

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 1d

…The story is less about the witch’s magic and more about the strange equilibrium of living beside it. How does acceptance become its own quiet transformation?

#writingprompt #witch #acceptance

Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 1d

…in the evenings. She converses with crows. She blesses the kettle before pouring tea. None of this is hidden, and none of it is treated as extraordinary. The writer, at first unnerved, slowly learns to live with it, to write amid her quiet spells and mundane miracles…

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 1d

Daily writing prompt #89:

Write a story in the form of a travel diary by a weary writer who retreats to a small coastal lodge to finish their book. The lodge is run by a witch. She brews storms in the mornings and rainbows…

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 1d

Sorry if I were in your earshot on the gym floor tonight and you had to tolerate my interminable vocal bursts. I was only trying to watch the Mamdani Cuomo debate. Also, Curtis??—who is this diva dealing the snarkiest quips at Cuomo. Give him his beret back! @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social for mayor!

Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 1d

The low res, doorbell security cam deepfakes annoy the crap out of me—because what do you mean a toddler petting a crocodile isn’t real

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Reposted by Arman Chowdhury 🍉

Saeed Jones @theferocity.bsky.social · 3d

To become dependent on ChapGPT is to evacuate yourself from your own life.

YIKES, no thanks. I’m gonna be alive inside every damn thing I do, even and especially the ish I don’t wanna do.

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 6d

What I love about Chris Kraus’ latest novel “The Four Spent the Day Together” is that it reads like an arbitrarily collated text dump of a writer’s entire computer hard drive—files spanning her essay drafts on family history to save-for-later newsarticles on teenage murder.

Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 6d

He waits for me to take his pictures

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 6d

We all know this—and yet we keep yearning for validation along the most normative ways. We don’t have to fight for resources or attention. We don’t have to compete and topple others. We can keep expanding our numbers, create new networks, breathe life into abundant forms of art.

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 6d

As writers, artists, creators, we level up when we have an abundance mindset with regard to putting our work into the world. Rejection from the status quo doesn’t have to keep us from reaching our people and audience.

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 9d

…uncertainty. How can pacing and repetition make the reader feel the ache of waiting? What does the silence between updates reveal about love, fear, and control?

#writingprompt #waiting #silence #language #uncertainty #writersky

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 9d

…to return a call that might change everything. The world outside keeps moving, indifferent, while time inside the room stretches and collapses. Focus on what happens in stillness—the small gestures, the looping thoughts, the way language begins to fail under the weight of…

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 9d

Daily writing prompt #88:

Write a story centered on the unbearable act of waiting. Someone sits by a window, a hospital bed, a phone that refuses to ring. They’re waiting for news: a loved one to reach home safely, to wake from surgery, to take their final breath…

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 10d

Trying to write a character who’s way more educated than I am on paper and…I might as well get a PhD in the process

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 10d

…about catastrophe without spectacle? What small acts of denial or tenderness reveal the true cost of loss? How do you let empathy coexist with culpability?

#writingprompt #writersky #POV #tragedy #violence

Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 10d

…families, first responders, and the person responsible. Each sees the same event differently, each reshapes it to fit their own guilt, grief, or need for meaning. Use intimate, human detail to expose the slow violence that lingers long after headlines fade. How can you write…

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 10d

Daily writing prompt #87:

Write a story about a seemingly small tragedy—a bus explosion, a collapsing bridge, a neighborhood accident—that quietly transforms the lives of everyone connected to it. Let the story unfold through the intersecting perspectives of survivors,…

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 12d

This prompt is inspired by the novel “Into the Sun” by C. F. Ramuz (New Directions) www.ndbooks.com/book/into-th...

Into the Sun

It’s been a hot summer for a Swiss lakeside town—both bucolic and citylike, old-fashioned and up-to-date—when a “great message,” telegraphed from one continent to another, announces an “accident in th...

www.ndbooks.com

Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 12d

…How can you let natural detail carry the dread? When do you reveal the calamity, and how do you hold some questions unanswered?

#writingprompt #climatechange #clifi #writersky

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 12d

…people split into factions trying to survive what seems like an impossible fate. Use multiple small perspectives—farmers, schoolchildren, an outsider—so the collapse feels collective yet deeply personal. How do you give distinct voice to each vantage point?…

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Arman Chowdhury 🍉 @armanchowdhury.bsky.social · 12d

Daily writing prompt #86:

Write a story set in a quiet mountain village when news arrives announcing that Earth is spiraling toward the sun. At first no one believes it—crops are fine, the sky looks unchanged—but soon heat becomes unbearable, order collapses, and…

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