Your Brain on Writing

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I’ve been reading (devouring) Fire Up Your Writing Brain, by Susan Reynolds (click on the title to go to her blog). Late in the book, Reynolds quotes Margaret Atwood on why a writer should read her own work aloud, a long-time practice of my own.

Black marks on a page are like a musical score, they don’t come to life until they are being played. A score for violin is not actualized until somebody takes up a violin and plays the music. That’s when it turns back from paper and ink into music. Pages are like a magic freezing mechanism whereby you take a voice and you put it into a score on the page — it’s a score for voice, it always is — and it becomes actualized again when somebody reads it and turns it back into a voice. –Margaret Atwood

Photo by Steve Johnson from Pexels

Reading aloud is a great tool for self-editing, but I think this quote speaks, even more, to the alchemy of the writer-to-reader link.

I am trying to remember when I was first given the advice to read my work aloud. My poetry professor at the University of Washington, Nelson Bentley, used to tell us to, but I think it came before, in my very first literature class at Edmonds Community College. Pat Nerison had assigned a paper on the poems we had been reading, and she recommended that we read them aloud before we began writing. “I have roommates!” I protested. “Go in the bathroom and turn the water faucet on,” she said. “They won’t hear you.”

Best Practices

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What to do with an abandoned pickup? Grow wildflowers in it!

I’ve been thinking, for various reasons, about this phrase, “Best Practices,” which I was introduced to a long time ago, in graduate school and when I was teaching as an adjunct. The idea as I understood it then was that in a situation that is stubbornly imperfect — an intractable situation, or one in which you don’t have much control — listing the best practices possible will give you some traction just when you most need it.

This could be a journaling assignment. First try listing your intractable situations, the situations that you just don’t know what to do about; the people or relationships who can’t be easily “solved,” if at all (think of that person who you can’t change); a piece of writing that refuses to lie still on the page.

Then choose one and list the small, useful things that you might do, or that maybe you are doing.

For some reason I’m reminded of a bizarre to-do list that made the rounds of email several years ago. It included a bunch of ridiculous items, which I don’t remember, but it had two that I found rather useful. One was, “Write a list of what you’ve already done and then check all the items off.” That made me feel so much better! The other was one that my kids and I loved: “When someone is behaving badly at a meal, look at them through the tines of your fork and pretend they are in jail.” Totally worked! For a long time this was a “best practice” for our family. It reminded us to laugh and it clarified for the offender that they were misbehaving.

When you’re feeling really really stuck on a writing project, maybe your best practice could be to reread a paragraph or a page written earlier. Maybe a best practice is to type up something written in longhand, or to retype a poem into a new form with shorter or longer lines, or tercets instead of quatrains. Impossible to imagine even this amount of progress? What if you just opened your notebook and sat with it in your lap for a minute or two? What if you just imagined yourself writing? fork

This week I have done a lot of driving and I’ve had lots of appointments and errands and
meetings. My daughters have been a teensy bit demanding. My mother had a doctor’s visit that I needed to attend. My best practice was to carry a book and a notebook and pens and highlighters everywhere I went. When I had a little time in my writing cabin, feeling frazzled and apt to be interrupted at every moment, I set my timer for fifteen minutes and sorted a pile of papers until I found the three short stories that I knew I had already printed out. When I couldn’t find enough time in which to work (whatever “enough” would look like), yet felt desperate to work, I reread the opening of one story and made a few notes. And ran to my next thing.

I have to admit, it’s Saturday night, at the end of this busy week, and I’m feeling weirdly elated. I think it’s because I decided I was going to make the best of things, in fact, that I came up with my first short story idea in eons — this week.

What best practices might you come up with, for your intractable stuff?

One Small Step

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I recently came across a small book titled One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. The author, Robert Maurer, didn’t really tell me anything new, but he did reinforce beautifully what I already knew. And in an extremely simple way.

As it is a small book, One Small Step was also pretty easy to just … well, read, all the way through. The interesting thing is how (given how much I read) it has stuck with me.

I’m always preaching the wisdom of writing for just 15 minutes. Robert Maurer breaks that down even further. How about five minutes? Still can’t get yourself to do it? How about one minute? What if you just thought about the change, deliberately, intentionally, for a few seconds every day at a given time?

“The little steps of kaizen are a kind of stealth solution….Instead of spending years in counseling to understand why you’re afraid of looking great or achieving your professional goals, you can use kaizen to go around or under these fears.”

One Small Step includes the story of a working, single mother Maurer encouraged to walk in place for one minute, during a commercial break of a TV show she liked to watch after her kids were in bed. For a writer who wants to start a journal habit, but has been unable to, Maurer suggests sitting with the notebook open, pen at hand, for a minute. A minute! He addresses a lot of subjects — test anxiety, relationships, business goals — and in every case, he suggests the smallest possible components toward building a solution.

Of course the beauty of writing for fifteen minutes isn’t because, over a span of days, the minutes will begin to add up, but that dedicating a little thought, a little willingness to go in the direction you want to go, tends to create more of the same.  The science of it has to do with building new nerve pathways. But you don’t need to understand the science to know that it works.

I don’t know why we feel so much resistance to doing what we in fact want very badly to do (be healthy, get in shape, write a book, travel, fill-in-the-blank-for-yourself), and I have been told that there are people who in fact don’t feel the resistance; they just do it. But if you’re like me, you could begin by brainstorming how to break down what you want to achieve into its smallest conceivable component — this morning or in your life (or both). Then, just do that one small thing.

I won’t go into full-lecture mode about “repeat daily.” But how can you say no? One minute!

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

 

Creating a Life 101

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This Saturday I’m teaching a class — Writing the Creative Chakras — with my friend Margaret Riordan, and I think I’m having a panic attack.

When I was a new teacher, I had a mentor who told me, “Teaching is easy: you go in the first day of class and teach your students every thing you know; and then you do that again on the second day, and the third, all the way to the fiftieth.” I’ve never been sure whether he thought he was being helpful, or funny, or what exactly. But there is a core of truth to the statement. All you had to do was show up that first day, with everything you were and everything you had, and share it, openly and honestly. If you could bring yourself to do that, your students would meet you there.

This class is a one-day class, and so my “just show up the first day” mantra is not working for me.

What I’m reminding myself of is that I don’t have to get through the whole day, not at once, at least. Same as with my writing day, all I have to do is get through the first fifteen minutes — or five minutes! — and then the next small increment, and then the next. Same with writing any project. You don’t have to write the whole book. Just a page. Just a sentence. Just the first word. And then the next.

All I have to do is bring everything I have and all that I am, and show up. That’s how we create our lives, too.

I recently came across this video on Facebook of a 102 year old woman riding a horse — and as Grandma Riggs says, “This is not the time to be nervous.”

There are still open chairs in the class. Let me know if you’d like to fill one.

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