Endless Roll – Page 11 – the pelagic school

ENDLESS ROLL // SITE ARCHIVE

in descending chronological order

accretion (day 25)

Continuing the alternation between outwardness and inwardness, look outward from your writing today. Perhaps this means repeating the process of gathering materials to incorporate, or

accretion (day 24)

Today, continue the alternation between outwardness-openness and inwardness-clarity. In a planetary accretion, when a mass of stuff reaches a certain critical size, it has enough

accretion (day 23)

For the next several days, you will alternate between things that are additive and things that concentrate or condense. Even if you have a strong

accretion (day 22)

Before you begin writing today, read through what you’ve written and see if you can discover latent impulses or patterns. Find something that is already

accretion (day 21)

Today, before you start writing, identify for yourself where your interest lies in what you’ve been building. Think of interest as a draw, as something

accretion (day 20)

Use your writing time today to apply pressure on the material that you’ve written so that it draws toward a center or a core. Consider

accretion (day 19)

Today, consider polyphony and tonal range. What are all the voices that combine into your writing so far, whether strands of your own, or appearing

accretion (day 18)

Read all the possible pathways then take the one that most appeals. Or ignore them all and go where your impulse or intention takes you. Continuing

accretion (day 17)

Think about what is unfinished in your writing: lines of story, of energy, of plot, trains of thought. Choose one thing in your writing to

accretion (day 16)

Before you write, take two elements from what you have written on prior days and bring them near each other in your mind. If they

accretion (day 15)

You’re at the half-way point of the thirty-day structure. There was a proposition at the outset that you could leave yourself something that felt finished

accretion (day 14)

Today, continue to focus on energy or energies in your writing, with an added focus on how those energies change over time. Before you write,

accretion (day 13)

Today, give attention to energies in your material: speed, friction, attraction, repulsion, heat, spin . . . Options, depending on what kind of momentum you

accretion (day 12)

Today, do something elemental. Maybe restrict yourself to a single sentence. Your daily teacher is the day outside.

accretion (day 11)

Today, let your writing be permeated by your environment. If you can, take yourself somewhere visually or sonically rich and write there, allowing the sights

accretion (day 10)

Choose one of these two prompts today. Both are oriented toward the incoming: —Create an invitation; put out a call for a certain kind of

accretion (day 9)

Today, let something jump into your writing from a skew line, a weird orbit, a region otherwise in your blind spot. Today, let something old

accretion (day 8)

Find a new center and restart the process by zeroing in on a small scatter of images or focal points and playing with what happens

accretion (day 7)

Today, write by editing, sliding around, rearranging. Knit, swap, delete. Knead, recalibrate. Pare. Don’t write any new words except as needed to solve the grammar

accretion (day 6)

In your writing today, say no to something, even if just temporarily or as a path to something that’s been unspoken or unseen. Find a

accretion (day 5)

In the planetary accretion metaphor, one of the early questions is: what kinds of dusts and gasses are in the cloud from which this small,

accretion (day 4)

Instead of writing something new today, or as a prelude to new writing, look over what you have written for the last three days and

accretion (day 3)

Let something new swerve into your vision from the horizon of your focus. Let it move into the foreground. Maybe careening in and announcing itself

accretion (day 2)

The process of accretion is one of taking separate things and slowly merging them to make larger and larger objects, which eventually combine into one

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?

ENDLESS ROLL // SITE ARCHIVE

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