Thirty Days of A: My Month Writing Everything That Starts With the First Letter

It started, fittingly, with an argument.

A friend of mine — a poet who shall remain nameless because she asked me to — claimed that constraint was the only honest muse. I disagreed. I'd spent years believing that total freedom was the writer's ideal: blank page, open horizon, anything possible. She laughed at me and issued a challenge. "Write everything with A for a month," she said. "Every entry, every email, every grocery list. Then tell me freedom was working out for you."

So I did it. Thirty days. One letter.

The Rules of the Game

The rules were simple, almost stupidly so. Anything I wrote by hand or typed had to begin with a word starting with A. Journal entries. Work emails. Texts to my sister. The list on the fridge that read, on day one, "apples, avocado, aluminum foil, almonds."

I allowed myself a few exceptions — legal documents and anything involving my landlord — but otherwise, A was the gatekeeper. If I couldn't start with A, I had to keep circling until I found a way in.

The first week was miserable. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Every sentence felt like a hostage negotiation. "Regarding your question..." "About the meeting..." "Anyway..." — I leaned on the same tired openers until they wore grooves in my brain.

Then, somewhere around day nine, something shifted.

When the Wall Becomes a Door

Here's what nobody tells you about constraint: it doesn't just limit you, it relocates you. Forced to begin with A, I couldn't take my usual routes. I had to approach every thought from an angle I'd never used before. My journal entries stopped being recaps of my day and became actual discoveries. "Anger, I'm realizing, is just grief wearing a work uniform." I never would have written that sentence on a free morning. It took the letter A dragging me there sideways.

This is ancient practice, by the way — not some modern productivity hack. Abecedarian writing, where verses or passages follow the order of the alphabet, runs deep through human history. Psalm 119 is an abecedarian epic, eight verses for every Hebrew letter, Alef to Tav. The ancient Greek alphabet — which itself descended from the Phoenician system that gave us Alef, the ox, the very first letter — was used as a mnemonic scaffold for hymns and prayers. Writers from Chaucer to contemporary poets like Harryette Mullen and the late A.R. Ammons have played with alphabetical structures, not because it's easy, but because it isn't.

Marilyn Hacker once wrote a book of poems, Alphabet, built entirely on this spine. When I emailed a poet friend who works with similar constraints, she told me something that stuck: "The form does the worrying so the mind can do the wandering."

That's exactly what the month felt like. The letter A did my worrying. I got to wander.

A Few Things I Learned

The alphabet is a ladder, not a cage. By week three, I was writing things that surprised me. My grocery lists became small poems — "arugula, apricots, aspirin" has a rhythm to it that "milk, eggs, bread" simply doesn't. My emails got shorter and stranger. Constraint trimmed the fat.

Beginning is the whole battle. There's a reason the site you're reading is called Key to Alef and not Key to Tav. Alef — the first letter, the silent one, the ox that carries everything — is where all the resistance lives. Once you've started, momentum handles the rest. My experiment weaponized this. By making the beginning itself the puzzle, I stopped dreading beginnings. They became play instead of dread.

Boredom is a door. Around day sixteen, I ran out of obvious A-words. Anyway. Also. Apparently. Actually. I'd exhausted them. So I had to reach: "Amble." "Anodyne." "Arc." Reaching for words I don't usually use jolted my vocabulary awake. My writing got more specific because laziness wasn't an option.

What Happened When the Month Ended

On day thirty-one, I sat down to write a journal entry that could begin with any letter I pleased.

I started with A anyway.

Not out of obligation. Out of habit — and then out of choice. The constraint had rewired something. I still use it now when I'm stuck: if a piece won't come, I make it start with A. Or B. Or whatever letter feels wrong. The wrongness is the point. The wrongness is the key.

My poet friend, when I confessed this, wasn't surprised. "Nobody stays for the letter," she said. "They stay for the door it opens."

Thirty days of A taught me what mystics and monks have known for centuries: the gate you think is keeping you out is often the very thing leading you in. Freedom, it turns out, is overrated. A single letter is plenty.