The 20-minute writing workout

Last week, Eli Epstein wrote an op-ed about how small groups at NYU need to be given a bigger voice. Well, Eli, you're right — and voice is what this one is all about.

If Rachel Broderick could eat words, she probably would. She's the kind of person who takes Roland Barthes' "The Pleasure of the Text" as a life philosophy. Every Thursday night, she closes her eyes and listens to chunks of writing that have been scrawled out in wild, wandering 20-minute chicken scratch. Some are stories, some are poetry. Most are blocks of vivid prose that defy genre and explanation. Invariably, after the applause has evaporated, she hones in and chomps down on exactly what was awesome about each one.

Rachel, a CAS senior, is the baseball cap-wearing brains behind Headless Society, a creative writing club she started her freshman year. Every meeting, she brings a big, nebulous idea — probably one that's been bothering her — to 30 people in a tiny conference room. And then she gives them exactly 20 minutes to write.

If it sounds like the SAT, that's because stress is the point.

"The goal of each prompt is to somehow exacerbate the completely unique personality of each person involved," Rachel told me. "We try to bring out the quirks."

The output is raw, often beautiful, and even more often bizarre. And it's always authentic.

"Because it was written in 20 minutes or less, you know that it isn't contrived, and it doesn't sound contrived, either," she said.

The club has appendages — a yearly publication called "The Guillotine" and "legit parties" where people have been known to bust out group sonnets — but it's really about that ritual of creation. That's what Headless is, what keeps people coming: the involving, immediate act. One freshman even told Rachel that it was the reason she came to NYU.

As Derek Kroessler, a CAS senior, put it: "Headless twinkles inside me like a cheeseburger made out of stars."

Last week, the topic was bodies. Rachel took a bizarre DNA video she'd been forced to watch in her natural science class and unleashed it on the last people it was meant for: people with moleskine notebooks. Following the group's suggestions, she wrote body parts from "vagina" to "taint" and beyond all over the whiteboard. The challenge: Use 10 of them in your writing, along with select phrases from "Paradise Lost."

After 20 minutes, the products were stunning. One guy had a nearly complete story that sounded like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." One girl had a twisted and genital-ridden reimagining of the story of Adam and Eve. ("Man, fuck Adam," Rachel responded.) Another girl volunteered to share her work even though she'd never shared anything, ever.

"You don't have to make yourself vulnerable to write a good paper," Rachel said.

At Headless, vulnerability is essential.

I could say something about how Headless exemplifies community at NYU, and how that's something precious and wonderful and we should water it every day like the shoe-plant in "Wall-E." And it would be true, if completely and utterly cliché.

But I think the really cool thing about Headless is the way it reattaches you to writing. Sure, it's not for everyone, and you may want to crumple up and burn your 20-minute prose poem about digested pizza after you're done. But it takes pure, molten selfhood to produce that. When you look at it, you might see a chunk of who you are.