tunings – the pelagic school

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:

Magnificence Tuner

Describe an utterly magnificent theatrical experience or book or poem (or song or…). Describe it in exactly four sentences with no concern for its feasibility.

Then take a moment to read your description to find out what it tells you about your own desires. Can you identify a way to allow some of this magnificence into the thing you are currently writing or about to write?

here's the full tuning exercise archive:

Something from the Empty

A tuning exercise for understanding something about what matters to you about making things.

Ordinary Intensities

Tuning exercise for tracking the attention that intensifies your interest.

Your houses

A tuning exercise for thinking about story spaces you hold in memory.

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.

Your Languages

A tuner for thinking about the languages you speaking with

Magnificence Tuner

Tuning exercise for desire

For Stuck Places

Tuner with a question borrowed from Deborah Hay

Find a Daily Teacher

Tuning exercise for finding a daily teacher

Sticky Things

A tuning exercise aimed at the sticky things circling your mind.

Relay Self-Interview

Tuning exercise for following your own threads

In a Borrowed Voice

Tuner for clarifying what you’re aiming at

Credo Refresher

Tuner for thinking about an area of habit or through a recent failure of expectations.

Circumference Tuner

Tuning exercise using your writing space as teacher.

Let it Ask Questions

A tuning exercise for a writing in progress or just before the progress.

Tutelary Saints

A tuning exercise to find a tutelary saint, for courage etc.

mind tenants

Write a list of seven things that are occupying your mind today.

today’s answers

Set a timer for 4 or 5 minutes and write an account of your writing mind and heart as you find yourself today. You might

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

following paragraph (tuning)

Pick up a book and read a paragraph. Then close the book and write a paragraph to follow it, trying to preserve something about the

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

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

edge of the field

Use the tuning time to ask yourself, either through a timed writing or a simple list format, what else is at the edges of your

passing and lurking

Make a diagrammatic diary of all the things passing through your mind today. Find a way to note which are passing and which are lurking.

self-interview with digging

Do a self-interview, where you are both the interviewer and the answerer. Write it out or record yourself speaking. Focus on a few events that

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?