3-Draft Workshop: Musical/Architectonic/Textile

End of Week One

END OF WEEK ONE: Cull/share/respond/enlarge

*Hope you have had a good week of collecting (or thinking about collecting, however you are using this workshop). There’s been a lovely trickle of new subscribers all week so hi & welcome and pass it on. Week 2 has a combinatory, germinative mandate, supplied in large part by the things you found this week, so this end-week process is reflective but also provisions you for what’s next. You can expect week two’s structure in your inbox tomorrow.*

Look back over the elements you circled or highlighted as you collected this last week. (If you didn’t trawl as you collected, do it now: the idea is to surface a shorter list of appealing finds. Use something (different colored pen or highlight tool) to give your eye a clear landing place.) As you do, it’s fair to add more items to your pickup list. (You might also choose to add sources, an old notebook, last night’s dreams, today’s newspaper…)

Transfer your trawl bounty to a new page or to a file. You can skip this step if you want, but I find the simple work of transferring and transcription adds an opening and clarity in my mental space. Be playful with what this new collection looks like. You’ll be going back to it several times in next week’s work, so let the page appeal to you.

SHARE this short list with your pod. If you are in a self-pod, I suggest choosing a response structure you can follow in advance (i.e. a self-interview, a letter addressed to yourself, an illustrated free-associated doodle page) that will leave you with some writing or notes you can come back to – so don’t just self-pod in your head. If you’re doing a wig-pod (wherein you channel someone else), then consider the possible delights of audio recording your wig-comments.

POD RESPONSES are tuned to appearances, connections, associations, and latent patterns. Respondents give back:

What interests do you see?

Are there any emergent patterns or types in the list?

Does anything in this list evoke an association or suggest a possible area of research?

Reflect further (set a timer for 7 minutes, 15 minutes…) on this question: what set of voices do you imagine gathering together in this emergent thing you’re writing? Spend some time imaging their experiential sources/funds, their moods and energies, the way it feels to be near them (whether imaginatively in prose or manifested in a script/scene).

Additional range: if you’re writing something totally from scratch, you might be happy to play entirely with these collected materials, but if you’re aiming this writing project toward something—whether that’s a portion of a larger project or just an image in your head you’ve been nursing, or a thing you’ve been hoping to write but haven’t ever quite found the time to write—then now is the time to articulate for yourself what is important to you about what you’re aiming at.

—Think about this first in terms of images (do you see flickers of something in your mind, is there a key moment or a key person’s face that appears in your imagination when you think about this project, aim, topic).

—Then think about this in terms of questions, both questions it raises or might raise for a reader, and questions you have for yourself about why this project, aim, topic is important to you.

—Write for a while (15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour…) to try to bring those images and those questions into focus. At the end, if it’s pleasing to you, you might add notations to your trawl list or make a separate page.

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Table of Contents

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?