TUNING EXERCISES

Tuning exercises are designed to clarify what is important to you today. They open space to mark the subtle or not subtle changes over time in your temperament, commitments, and sense of self as a writer.

here's a tuning exercise dialed up at random:

Ordinary Intensities

An audio version of this tuning exercises is playable at the bottom of the page.

Think about something from your ordinary life, something you don’t necessarily associate with the impulse to write, but with your daily routine. Think back through it, if you already did it today, or perhaps take some time now to do either something you have to do—a pee break, a tidy-up of the room, a message you’re obligated to send, food you need to prepare—or something you like to do that you do every day—a coffee break, sitting in a particular chair, whatever. As you do this ordinary thing, take it as more than what it is by itself: take it on as an occasion, an incitement, to writing. Seek out the thing that is intense in it, that is, something strong enough to move you to feeling, thinking or feelingthinking, and toward the impulse to record. Write a short piece (try either exactly 50 or exactly 100 words) that is occasioned by that ordinary intensity.

Read what you wrote aloud. Write a note-to-self, about the texture and interest of attention in the piece you just wrote. See if you can carry that texture and interest into your other writing or making for the day. Think of this attention as a kind of digging tool or dousing rod or radar: an instrument that allows you to home in on intensity within a scene.

here's the full tuning exercise archive:

After Burrows

A tuning exercise for refreshing, expanding, or redrawing the map of your self-understanding as a maker after you’ve been making things for a long time.

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pleasure note

Set a timer for five minutes and try to list anything that has emerged in your writing so far that feels felicitous to you. Use

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mind lodgers

Make a list of ten things that are occupying your mind today, both long-term lodgers and passing thoughts and images. Sit with your list and consider

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special energy

Think about your writing’s core. Set a timer for five minutes and write about what matters to you (or has a special, appealing energy) that

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Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?