drop at a time

Feeling the sensous pull of summer? 25 ways to let it draw your writing into the dreamtime.

I’ll be away for a while this summer, not on vacation or at some retreat but in a staring-at-the-ceiling (or the stars) reverie, re-entering that space where identity and time are fluid, if just because nights are warmer and something in me knows that a summer night is one long dream.

And I admit, there will be small … side trips. I’ve been thinking of how some summers when I was young were a series of obsessions: learning to type, and then making newsletters. Or going out in the dark to filch roses from nearby bushes so I could fill jars with petals that never quite dried. Or playing Monopoly until no one could stand it, and moving on to Scrabble or tag.

So many games and adventures began with a ringleader saying: Let’s. Let’s sneak onto the golf course and pick up balls. Let’s see how many Popsicles we can eat. Let’s hide in a crawl space and play cards till someone finds us.

What does this have to do with writing? Nothing and everything. Some part of summer’s expansiveness has to spill into the way we write, and maybe it’s time to let sensuality and imagination overtake us and see what happens.

So let’s. Let’s experiment. Let’s pretend the list below is a treasure map—or a series of writing prompts. Three, two, one… Go!

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Let’s all:

Climb to the top of a grassy hill and roll down.

Get up at sunrise on the solstice to watch the longest day of the year  begin, then linger outside as sunset becomes twilight and watch till the final drop of daylight disappears into the dark.

Lie on our stomachs in the grass and watch the intricate rituals of ants.

Sit outside whispering in the dark.

Let's write aerogrammes to imaginary selves that live in Paris or the South Pacific.

Listen to waves and wind.

Or drive with the windows down and the heat turned up to a place where the stars are too thick to count.

Let's make up stories about our past lives and write them in locked diaries.

Let's dye our lips and tongues blue with berries.

Go barefooted all day.

Sit under trees and listen for wisdom.

Let’s write love notes to ourselves and our cats and our books and our favorite places.

Throw wildflower seeds on bare patches of ground.

Stop to admire dandelions growing up through sidewalk cracks.

 

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Let's walk around the block backwards.

Make forts out of card tables and blankets and go in and write.

Let’s take our laptops out to the patio or porch or park and transcribe the language of night.

Let’s buy packs of index cards and write a word we love on each card, then shuffle them into poems.

Pretend we know we’re being spied on and find private places to write, out of the reach of  recorders and cameras, even our own, even the ones on our phones and computers, even the ones we trust.

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Let’s write in the margins of books and on our hands and on cocktail napkins.

Let's write in invisible ink and code, as if our secrets were precious.

Let’s sip mugwort tea and dream.

Let’s read with a flashlight under the covers.

Let’s fill ourselves up and write each other letters about what we've tasted.

Let’s write like it’s summer, like it’s play.

And if you’re in a part of the world where it’s not summer, come join us anyway, in your sweaters and hats.

Enjoy! 

(Grass image by sundaykofax, patio image by ahdummy, cocktail napkin by Listen Missy!, all  via Flickr.)

Elephants in tutus: What I learned about writing at the barre

A little over a year ago, a woman I instantly began thinking of as “the crazy Russian lady” showed up at my easy-going morning exercise class and announced she was the new teacher. Exuberant and kinetic, Zhanna spends much of her life teaching Zumba, but we'd be learning a gym-friendly version of ballet. And she assured all of us— the weak, the semi-motivated, the too-stiff-for yoga—that none of those adjectives mattered. We'd easily pick up the basics she'd learned from her teachers in Russia. Eyebrows rose. Us? Ballet? I pictured elephants in tutus.

“Ballet,” as far as I could see, consisted of long, long sets of rapid leg lifts alternating with stunts that involved balancing on one leg while swinging various other body parts around. Through it all we were instructed to “up your chin” or “make leg like dog at hydrant” as the Zumba tracks blared and the crazy Russian lady yelled “nonstop, nonstop!” anytime we began to flag. Which was often.

But the impossibility of it all was weirdly compelling. What were people like us doing in a class like that? And why did she keep acting as though we could do this thing we clearly weren’t cut out for? It was a mystery. It was also sort of fun. I think we kept coming back to find out what would happen.

My expectations were so low I counted any progress as a victory. The way I saw it, I could only get better. At first, I stopped every time my mind said: “I can’t do this” or “I’m too tired,” but I started to realize that that was practically all it said—so I began to ignore it and just pay attention when my body announced it was time to take a break.

There was a lot of laughter and eye rolling in that class in the early months. Just look at us, the smiles would say, as we wobbled and shook. All around the room, bodies were relearning how to stand, tipping and flailing and falling, trying again. How could it possibly take so many muscles in so many places to stay upright on one leg?

 

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What pulled us forward? A sense of play.

We kept showing up twice a week for an hour at a time, getting imperceptibly better at “upping our chins” and remembering to “straight our shoulders.” When someone brought her two young ballet-student daughters to class, their supple grace set our teetering stiffness in relief. We could see what our moves would look like performed by dancers. We clapped and cheered the girls. No one was going to wave a wand and make us nine years old again. All we could do was enjoy their beauty and our own stubborn persistence. We’d be there at the next class. It was something we did now. For the heck of it, just to play around.

All these months later, progress seems to be sneaking up on us. None of us is doubled over panting five minutes into the class anymore, and all of us are stronger. Weeks and weeks went by when it seemed as though nothing was happening, but every once in a while I’d realize that standing on one leg was no big deal anymore, or notice we all looked taller.

The unintended side effect? Somewhere along the line, the “throw yourself in there and see what happens” approach began to spill over into my writing practice. There was something about the experience of being a beginner that my writing longed for.

The perks of writing as a beginner

* As a beginner, you get big points just for showing up and trying. No one expects you to be perfect. You don’t expect you to be perfect. The victory is in returning to the effort.

* When the going seems absurdly hard, a beginner is likely to laugh and say, “This is absurdly hard!” The laugh is forgiving, accepting. Of course it’s difficult—you haven’t done it before! You’re figuring it out!

* A certain delight comes with beginner status. You don’t know what you’ll discover or how your small efforts will add up. So when you suddenly see yourself do something difficult with more ease, or recognize that you’ve used a move you hardly realized you had, or pulled an image that’s apt and beautiful out of the air, there’s surprise and pleasure in the accomplishment. Wow! That was me! (Beginners, you may have noticed, get a large supply of exclamation points.)

Every time we write, we’re beginning again. And approaching the blank page by asking, “I wonder what’ll happen today” brings a pleasure and freedom that’s all but blotted out when when the “serious professional” in us, the competitive part concerned with outcomes, asks: “I wonder if people will love this. Today's writing is only worth it if it's good.”

Just as an experiment, try letting yourself be a beginner when you sit down to write this week, beautiful writer person. Find the fun in taking the first awkward steps toward something new—dialog you've been wanting to try. A different kind of voice. A writing schedule you've been afraid to commit to. The story you're struggling to finish. Stay with the process of diving in, adjusting, trying again. The pirouettes and denouements will take care of themselves.

(Photo by David 23, via Flickr.)

10-minute writing excursions

So you've found a small slot in your schedule for writing, a bit of "transition time" between activities that will give you a foothold as you build a writing practice. How will you switch gears from life or work craziness to “writer’s mind”? Try this. * Start by closing your eyes and taking a few slow, deep breaths and exhaling completely. That can help you come back to your body when your mind is whirring.

* Shift your focus to your own voice.

If it’s one of those, “I’ve got nothin’” days, fill yourself up by closely observing one thing, whatever your eye lands on or your ear picks up, and describing it in as much detail as you can. That requires actually soaking up those details, and directing your mind to the challenge of finding words that evoke them. It’s an easy way to break a thought loop and wind up in the present, seeing.

(That’s why I mention it so often. If you’re feeling distant from writing, one of the great fears is that the basin is empty, that you’ll dip in and come up dry. Knowing that you can replenish yourself with what’s at hand can be a great relief.)

If you’ve got an Internet connection, you can click to a place like http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/ (that may take a subscription after a certain number of visits) or http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/ or http://news.yahoo.com/photos/ and click through a photo gallery until an image resonates. It shouldn’t take long. Fall into a photo and write from there—a description, a list of questions or a few lines of a caption that reflect the story you see or would make up about the image.

If you’re collecting the lines you’ve been writing in one place (a good idea), you can pick up where you left off, or begin to connect images or voices or impressions. Rearrange words. Make something new.

If you’re developing a piece, you can go there and spend time with it. Add details or questions. Look at it. Keep it in front of you and your mind will keep working on it. Tinker, add what comes to you, and don't forget to play.

Do you need and want longer stretches for writing? Sure. But if all you've got are tiny windows, why not check out the view?

 

Stone soup: The act of crafting something from 'nothing'

I’ve been writing a lot lately in my guise of “person who writes for other people,” and my brain is packed with details from their projects. Once, not that long ago, I might’ve made that my reason for not working on writing of my own. No brain space. That expression often feels literal, as though the mundane has displaced the mythic—or anything vaguely interesting—from the imaginal realm. Daily, though, I’ve been rescued by the seemingly rote, even mechanical, practice of choosing one thing in my environment to study closely, pore to pore, then writing down what I see. It can be a 10-minute practice, done anywhere, and I suggest it to you repeatedly because it’s such a simple way to restock your well of images, and connect your inner and outer worlds.

You’re standing at the back door, gazing into the twilight after the kids have gone to bed. Pick one shape out of the gathering darkness—the swing set, the hose coiled against the cement base of a wall—and start there, with the colors draining away, imagination pulling you to the messy wet spirals pressed onto the concrete, the sculptured brass curves of the nozzle that's dripping onto the grass.

Stored in a touch or a scent, doorways to endless stories

In such moments, you might be memorizing the world, its scents and shapes, what breezes across the skin. The moment is full enough, immediate enough, rich enough to bring you back to your body, to the page.

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Being present to what moves through you might pull you to another set of sensory images, a scene from the past, perhaps. That’s what happened to me today. I was—mechanically—choosing something to write about. How about that potted plant! It sounds unpromising, I know, but I lost myself in the unfurling corolla of leaves and in the loose soil I rolled between my fingertips.

My feet and fingers suddenly remembered the powdery dirt beneath the tall, scraggly pines of a canyon where my father took us once for a picnic. How smooth, almost slick that dirt was, even with its tiny pebbles. We dug our toes in, the way other kids might play in mud. I looked up from my feet and could see my father’s friend, in his now dusty black leather shoes and rumpled “office clothes,” curled on a blanket on the hillside above us, sleeping. An exhausted greyhound. He’d been up for days with my father—nowhere in the picture—trying to squeeze a few dollars out of a losing gambling streak.

All of that was there for me in the dirt.  What might sense memory hold for you?

A vehicle for conjuring & exploring the universe of a story

A client of mine began using her writing practice to travel through her mother’s kitchen, taking her own as a starting point. Pulling open a cupboard, she remembered her mother’s appliances, lined up like mechanical soldiers, a simple image that could be a doorway into character and a cascade of memories.

Ten minutes of writing, of seeing, of letting the body experience this moment and the mind connect it with the sense memory of other moments—ten minutes can be vast.

Even on the busiest, craziest, full-to-the-gills day, you have ten minutes, beautiful writer person. Today, open a cupboard, lift a cup, trace the edge of a leaf, run your hand over the carpet. The moment, this moment, is full of details, starting points, entryways. From “nothing,” a universe can bloom. Observe just one thing. Experience it with all your senses. Write. 

(Doorway image by runran, via Flickr.)

Writing while shopping, biking or feeding the cat

Sitting down to write can feel like walking in your front door and being greeted by a pack of friendly dogs, a mass of paws and fur and beseeching eyes and eagerly wagging tails. They bound into the quiet space of “I’m at the blank page now,” raucous and insistent. That e-mail I’ve put off answering is suddenly there with a leash in its mouth, begging for a walk. Those bills, those projects, that news flash and ping from Facebook, that birthday card, that urgent note I’ve spent all day remembering and forgetting—they all crowd in too.

When time is short and those dogs of distraction abound, I focus on the "seeing and sensing" part of writing, the part that's so still, it  doesn't excite the pack.  When I’m in my body instead of my racing mind, absorbing the way the barrista has folded a stream of foam into a delicate leaf, then running my finger over the warm smoothness of the cup, I’m pulled into the deep, necessary space that comes before writing: the moment. Right now.

Filling up the senses, looking long enough to see even one detail afresh, is  a portable “busy day/busy life” practice I use day in and day out: To notice one thing, and to write it down. If time allows, the daily writing can grow, making connections, refining lines. And if not, small is enough. If I’m paying attention, I’m able to write. Everything is built from that attention, which doesn’t need a desk or perfect setting—just the ordinary.

In a beautiful essay on the New York Times’ website in December, the novelist Silas House wrote about weaving a connection between seeing and writing, and how he builds his stories from the minutiae of his life by experiencing it through the eyes of his characters. It's that same practice of paying attention, tuned in a slightly different way.

As he rides his bicycle to work every morning, House writes, he’s focused on the traffic, but also on the character in the novel he’s writing:

“The book is set in Key West, so naturally [my character] rides his bicycle all over the Florida island. When pumping those pedals toward my office, I am not myself on an orange-leaf-strewed campus. I am my character, pedaling down to the beach after a long day of working as a hotel housekeeper. I see the world through his eyes. I imagine what he is thinking. I use that brief time to become him.

“I transform the mundane task of grocery shopping into a writing exercise by studying my fellow shoppers through the eyes of my character, a man who is on the run from the law….”

Attention alone isn’t writing, of course, and I caution too-busy writers, myself included, that seeing isn’t writing, and thinking isn’t writing and talking about writing isn’t writing. Writing is writing. But its angels are in the seeing, in the details. Right at the kitchen sink, or in the grocery aisle.

The question that stalls us: "How will it all turn out?"

Practically all the conversations I’ve had with writers recently—and a good number of the little talks that have gone on in my head—have somehow circled back to the question of certainty. Before the first word is written, before a playful desire has had a chance to riffle through the closet and try on a top hat or tutu, before a single tiny seed is dropped from cupped palm into waiting soil we want to know: How will it all turn out? Will they make fun of it? Will it be good? Will it sell? Will it make me safe and loved and successful? And what about that Nobel Prize?

One client wants to start a blog because she wants to spark a conversation about her ideas. And because blogging is how you get a job—employers want to see that. “But who will come?” her mind races on. “How will I market it? How popular will it be? Can I turn it into a book? What if it’s a tree falling silently in the massive electronic forest? What if I don’t get the job?”

That’s a wee bit of pressure, darlin’.

I’m all too familiar with that racing mind. It’s the voice inside me that demands a payoff before it makes an investment. The clenched part that wants some kind of guarantee. It doesn’t look kindly on messes and experiments. It only wants results.

It’s also the part of me that imagines the project, whether it’s a poem or a book or a play, as enormous. So massive and important and Pyramids of Gaza vast that it’s hardy possible for a mere human to construct.

Back to body, breath, and now

It’s not easy to start (or continue) when the stakes seem so high, the imagined competition so stiff. So when I notice those thoughts running loose again, I take a few deep, slow breaths and come back from the unknowable future into the room/the car/ my body/the page in front of me. If I feel prickles of anxiety in my neck or shoulders, I imagine pulling them off like thorns. If there’s a heavy weight on my chest, I lift it off and put it on the ground. I take another deep breath.

Back in the present, a little lighter, still breathing, I start small.

What’s in front of me, right now, that I can bring to my writing? (A green glass bottle of water, filled with reflections.) What are my senses taking in? When I look or listen closely, what’s’s right here, alive to my attention? What small detail can I bring back?

 

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The mantra: small, small, small

I return often to the word “small” when I think about writing—and when I sit down to write. Small is disarming. It doesn’t come with big expectations. It’s allowed to be fragmentary or rough or nonsensical. It’s allowed to play.

This week, I brought my writing a lemon, “a Meyer lemon so recently pulled from a branch that its skin was delicate as a petal and infused with the scent and memory of blossoms, and then mine was too.”

What will that lemon become? Or the hand that held it, or the woman who sat at the kitchen table, absorbed in gold and perfume, marveling over the way the flower had never disappeared from the fruit?

I don’t know yet. I don’t know how it all turns out.

But I do know that the lemon still breathes in me, and it’s the beginning of something, if only a glass of lemonade. I know, too, that I can keep asking questions to go deeper: How else does that lemon haunt me? What does it remind me of? When I slip back into that experience, that boat with a bright yellow hull, where does it take me?

The wonder cure

It’s not so hard to pay close attention to something in your life for just a few minutes during the day. To be with it, deeply experiencing it, and then to write a line or two. If you take on that practice, it’s yours, guided by you. You get to focus on whatever you want, to swoop toward something shiny, to be fascinated by whatever hooks you. If you’re working on a project, you can keep tracking  aspects of it with your open, curious presence. What did you notice? What color were its eyes? What happened inside you? You can ask and answer and go deeper, moment by moment.

Fascination. Curiosity. A sense of wonder and wondering about what’s here to be found right now. They’re the antidote for “How does it all turn out?” And they’re right here, waving you over, inviting you to play.

(Image by Chris Hunkeler via Flickr.)

Writing secret #1: Turn on your writer self first

If you ever picked up Julia Cameron’s classic on creative unblocking, "The Artist’s Way," you’re well familiar with morning pages. The idea is simple: First thing in the morning, you pick up your notebook and write three pages in longhand. About anything. Theoretically, this practice takes the heap of concerns, to-do’s, longings and big ideas—along with pettiness, complaints and irritation—out of your head, clearing space for the good work you want to you. It’s daily time with yourself, it’s writing, and it’s supposed to be a great incubator for your creative work. It never worked that way for me.

I failed at morning pages!

I was a devotee for quite a long time, and I’ve filled up many notebooks, following the instructions to a tee and devoting hours to covering the requisite three pages with my tiny (and yes, illegible) scrawl. Many people swear by doing this, and if you’re one of them, all I can say is: Fabulous. Keep it up!

But the ritual, as I look back on it, did very little for my writing. I wrote as fast as I could, I kept my hand moving, I laboriously put ink to paper. But something essential was missing: I didn’t turn on the writer in me. I never gave myself a charged starting point—a prompt, an observation, a question, a lingering image from a newspaper story or the emotional tone from a piece of music—as I do when I set out to do my own creative work. I didn’t hold my object of curiosity in my mind and feel my way around it, or place it next to something completely unrelated and see a web connections begin to spin. I just moved my hand, brain-dumped, and stayed true to an assignment that seemed, in the abstract, like something beneficial.

What I have to show for all that is a bunch of filled pages that I really need to throw away. By contrast, my working notebooks and files, the places where I keep starts, lines, ideas and inspirations are invaluable. Real work happens there.

Intention was the missing ingredient

I think the difference is in intent, in the tuning of the ear and eye to essence. I do better writing when I actually set out to write, rather than to “unblock” or vaguely “be creative.” I’ve had great results with free writing—fevered writing, some people call it—that same process of keeping the hand moving or the fingers typing. But it’s given back the most riches when I’ve given it a starting point that actually interests me, and aimed my rocket toward it before the writing takes on a life of its own. And when it happens that I find myself writing something that really interests me, I’’m OK with putting aside the idea that I’m doing fevered writing. And I might just break “the rules” and start to work on an actual piece, right then. (Shocking, I know. And let’s not mention that I was typing….)

Your writing knows when you’re walking in with a rote assignment and when you’ve actually engaged. So keep letting details and ideas pull you in when you observe something closely every day. Keep writing down what you notice. Keep being fascinated, even thrilled. And when you sit down to write—as you will when you start getting interested in the little daily lines  you’re collecting—state your intent: I’m working on a story. I’m working on a poem. I’m finding out what my book wants to be. I’m giving my writing some love—by writing something real.

Ah! Focus!

It sounds small and obvious, but if you’ve only got limited time to write, turning over most of it to the nebulous task of filling pages for its own sake may not be all that satisfying.

Try writing a little—a line. A paragraph or two, maybe. In a focused way. Pull on your “writer” intent and identity first. And if you need to break a rule or two in the game, go ahead. When your writing starts telling you what it wants, all you can do is listen.

Why even two minutes of writing can be enough

 

I’m sure you’ve heard it, maybe from a writer you love, someone you admire. Someone who’s a “real” writer. It’s the most succinct advice in the world:

You’ll never be a great writer unless you put in at least an hour a day. Sometimes it’s two hours. Even more. But let’s say it’s an hour a day.

It sounds so reasonable it must be true. Writers write. If they’ve got full-time jobs and families, they just get up at 4 a.m., when it’s quiet and the yogis say there’s more creative energy. And if you were serious, you’d do that too.

To which I’ve often said, “No possible way.” Quickly followed by the thought, “I must not be a real writer.”

The all-or-nothing trap

Every time I read some version of the “hour a day” truth posited by another writer I loved, perhaps someone who gave up everything for their art, I put another brick in the wall that was rising between me and my writing. In a way, that made things very simple. I ached to write, but I was at a desk in an office for 10 or more hours a day, I needed to eat and sleep and de-stress and try to have relationships, do laundry. I didn’t have the requisite hour, ergo, I should just leave the real writing to the people who did.

I did that for a long time, dying to write but getting farther and farther from it. It was like falling out of touch with a good friend. Less and less contact, then guilt about not seeing each other, until it was just too awkward to try to start again. What would I say? I was the one who couldn’t get it together to keep things going. All because I couldn’t come up with one crummy hour out of 24—which is not, I’d repeat to myself, a lot to ask.

So, with the perfect logic of all-or-none thinking, I let the writing drift away for long, long stretches.

The deliciousness of “just a taste”

That changed, for good, when I set aside the rules and sent my writer idols to another room to talk among themselves about suffering, sacrificing and writing in the pre-dawn hours. In the quiet, guilt-free space that remained, I asked: What would it feel like to just give myself a taste of what I wanted, and missed, so much?

I’d had the good fortune of studying meditation with a teacher who asked us to sit, during our first session, for just one minute, then two. Can you experience meditation in two minutes? Absolutely. Would two-minute writing breaks add up to anything? I thought I’d find out.

As it turned out, both practices “work” in two minutes, and both build easily from there. I gave my initial practice two parts. The first involved observing something—anything—with my writer’s sensibility.  And the second was to write down what I’d observed.

Those two steps gently put me back in the room with my writer self, the one that so delights in noticing, and in pulling words from whatever realm they occupy to capture them on paper.

This is what I learned: In two minutes, you can be awake. Your writing can stir. You can feel it breathing, find things to talk about. And two minutes by two minutes, you can be a real writer again. You already are.