From Elizabeth Bishop's One Art to the chapter "Cutting-In" in Moby-Dick, descriptions of process can provide a vivid, dreamlike, even filmic portrayal of detailed steps in a process while also telling a story and catapulting the reader into a state of empathy with the character at hand, because the reader mentally carries out the steps in the process. In teaching the reader how to do something, the writer triggers a universality and often deploys a specialized vocabulary that they can load which metaphor and meaning as they want. It's a powerful tool.

PROMPT:

Choose a scene that seems flat or that you're not inpired to write where a character in engaged in an activity or some sort, anything whether important or pedestrian, from brushing teeth to burying the dead. Instead of using that character as the actor, slip into a different narrative mode where you focus not on character but process, stripping out the point of view or active character, dropping names and contexts, and pushing it toward some form of instructions.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.