Two writers embark on a project together. One writes 500 words and sends it to the other writer. The other writer can do whatever he wants to the text (add, subtract, revise), but the result has to be 500 words longer than how it arrives. He sends it back to the first writer. Same rules apply: everything is fair game, but it has to be 500 words longer.

And back and forth until the agreed on length is arrived at.

Procreation for most advanced life forms requires the genetic information from two parties. This produces a varied genetic code. Asexual reproduction leaves only copies of oneself, and little opportunity for adaptation. If changes in environment occur to which the asexual being is vulnerable, then the entire species may be wiped out. If the code is varied, some beings may have a trait that protects them from those changes.

I think the above exercise is one way to combine two “genetic codes” into one piece. There is a story that David Milch, creator of Deadwood and NYPD Blues, tells about how he, at one point in his life, wrote the same 12 pages of a piece of fiction—word for word, line for line—over and over again. No changes. He expected something to happen eventually. Something to change. But it never did.

Oftentimes when I am writing, I will look to other stories or other writing for places that I can make my text more interesting. A way of inserting the genetic code of those writings that I love into my writing.

A recent example of this is when I took this sentence from The Education of Henry Adams: “Adams hung about the library; handled the books; deranged the papers; ransacked the drawers; searched the old purses and pocket-books for foreign coins; drew the sword-cane; snapped the travelling-pistols; upset everything in the corners, and penetrated the President’s dressing-closet where a row of tumblers, inverted on the shelf, covered caterpillars which were supposed to become moths or butterflies, but never did.”

And turned it into this passage from a story of mine: “The swallowtail caterpillars, colored yellow, black, and white, bore the loss of their home well as they tumbled out of their habitat and floated in the air.”

There weren’t caterpillars in the story before I found them in Henry Adams, but the vivid image was irresistible, and so those dead insects traveled through space and time and found themselves alive once more. And that’s how I injected Henry Adams’s genetic material into my writing in order to produce a more interesting result. A more durable text.