THREE SIX FIVE: PROMPTS, ACTS, DIVINATIONS (an inexhaustible compendium for writing)
with drawings by Nick Mauss
A New Yorker Best Book of 2026 So Far
A Poets & Writers’ The Time is Now Recommendation
There are 365 exercises for writing in this book, but it is not simply a book of writing exercises.
three six five is a “how-to” book of questions—not answers. It is an ars poetica of expanding possibility, a tarot deck of acts instead of images, a book of bending hours, a diary of contemplation and imagination, an antidote to consumption in the shape of care and attention.
These prompts, acts, and divinations—in alchemical combinations with new drawings by Nick Mauss—invite both aspiring and experienced writers to learn and unlearn, to mine memory and forgetting, to enter impossible spaces and create new ways of telling time, to inhabit multiple, other, and conflicting perspectives, to discover the elasticity of language and its constraints, to write by drawing, walking, listening, and even by being distracted.
While this is an inexhaustible compendium for writing, it is also an enduring reservoir for those who have no desire to be(come) a writer. Many exercises take the form of play, encourage collaboration with friends, strangers, and non-human beings, and operate off the page, often in the world, in the spirit of discovery rather than result. All intend to nurture and cultivate possibility.
Tracing the lineage of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, novelist, poet, and critic Lucy Ives offers encouragement, candor, and a deep appreciation for the vagaries, wonders, and challenges of a writing life.
READ
Ten Writing Prompts in The Paris Review
Excerpt in Graywolf Lab
Excerpt and Introduction in LitHub
Excerpt and Introduction in Kismet Magazine
LISTEN
Interview with Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition
Interview with Shiv Kotecha on Public Parking
Interview with Lisa Robertson on Dinner Music
WATCH
“Ordinary Magic: How Artists’ Books Transform Reading & Writing” lecture at The Clark Institute of Art
PRAISE
“Both a guide and a work of literature in its own right… the book resembles a devotional text or a mood ring. Inside, each of the 365 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… My favorite prompt from three six five, “weak spot,” turns the turbulence of the writing life into something that, on a good day, feels like a joyride.” —Dave O'Neill, The New Yorker
"The book is an almost-living thing, asking the reader to meet it halfway. Ives is the sort of conceptual thinker who views the audience as a collaborator, or else a co-conspirator. Though not an inaccessible book by any means, it is without question an experimental one." —James Webster, Full Stop
"To call Ives’s pages writing exercises is technically correct, but they are closer in feel to Conceptual poetry, accented by Nick Mauss’s spare, witty drawings and three red ribbons to mark your spots. Right now, my ribbons are on exercise no. 11—“Write a sentence that is or becomes a drawing”; no. 277—“Write the tale of an ambiguous miracle”; and no. 337—“Write an essay about a staircase you use all the time.” —Randy Kennedy, Ursula Magazine
