Boxes and Pauses

Boxes and Pauses

For when a draft is flowing in too many directions or at too great a speed, or when you find you’ve swerved off course and want to consider your direction:

In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, the comics artist Adrian Tomine describes the narrative form of comics, which tells stories in boxes, as a way to assert control over a chaotic experience. (Not all comics box their narrative moments in, but he was speaking of his own, which do.) 

If your story in progress feels like it’s moving chaotically — in too many directions at once, or maybe rushing out without leaving you time to consider whether or how you want to direct the development — try bringing it to a pause by putting the next sequence of events into boxes. Tightly bordered, highly focused, let each box contain a single moment or idea, and let the set of boxes lead with economy to a stopping point, drawing permission from the way comics panels are able to do away with transition, relying instead upon the human brain’s automatic effort to make sense of juxtaposed images. 

Translate “box” to prose along your first impulse. Is it a tight sentence? A paragraph with space on the page around it? Or do you literally insert a bordered table and write small entries into each cell?

Let the final box narrate a place of rest or pause. Once you’ve reached this place of pause, allow yourself to rest with this point in the story as if parked for the night. In the morning, or after a short walk, you can make a fresh decision about where to point your story, what to aim at. 

Or, if your story feels chaotic because you’ve been aiming all over the place, perhaps what you need to do in this pause is actually to back off, relinquish control, and try to sense any movement impulse already present in the story—an impulse that may have been obscured by an excess of intention or overthinking. 

Or, if you feel like you’ve been surrendering to whim too freely, have wandered off track, and are following a trajectory you don’t want to be on, perhaps read back through what you’ve written and identify where the spill or swerve into that trajectory started. Rewrite the scenes or passages prior to that swerve point by putting their sequences into boxes and bringing their flow to a pause. Then, from that place, identify a different direction you might take, and set off, exploring. 

Or, if the control you need is more about understanding what you’re writing—what’s there in the exploratory excess of any first draft—then you might want to use it as a way to get a pared down view of what you’ve been writing. Limit yourself to four or five panels and recap the whole thing, absent the burden of transition or explanation. What do you choose? What you leave out? Might be interesting to try the exercise twice: first before re-reading anything you’ve written, then again after re-acquainting yourself with your pages. 

All of these scenarios propose the economy and specificity of the boxes as a way to bring yourself to a point of pause or clarity of vision. As you exit the pause, consider where your recent process falls in the polarity of steering, navigational intention and yielding, surrendering following. Without overanalyzing it, make a simple decision about whether you want to steer or follow as you start back up.

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?