Valley Fold (Generator)

Generators are short prompts for finding new seeds, images, voices — bits and pieces that might fold into your writing. 

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Valley Fold (Generator)

A generative exercise for creating a compact event as a springboard for a story. (There’s also a development version of this exercise for a story in progress when it’s lacking some zing.)

In origami, a mountain fold is made by creasing a section of paper along its middle axis and then joining two edges together so that the crease becomes a small peak. A valley fold is the opposite, where the crease is tucked downwards and the two edges come together, sometimes disappearing the paper in between into a supportive pocket (which may or may not be unfolded again in a later step). We’ll take this full possibility of the valley fold that hides the connecting paper for this exercise. The analogy followed here uses the what-happens aspect of narrative—the event sequence—as the paper to be folded.

The preparation for this exercise is a stretch of exploratory, improvisational writing. Try tracking a figure or character, one summoned to mind, perhaps from the archive of strangers you’ve observed out there in the world, someone who sticks in mind. Do a timed writing session, of at least half an hour, so you have a chance to get bored and a chance to push through the boredom, where you follow this character around, narrating what they’re doing, thinking, where they’re going — any kind of trail you can pick up on. Let it be an improvisation. You might do this in one sitting or you might do it in several. If you want a scaffold for this exploratory writing, try some of the prompts from the Saint Cards workshop, which consider character from the standpoint of relation. 

After setting this writing aside for a stretch (take a walk if you’re doing this in one sitting, or leave it for a day if you’re doing it in several), read back through it identify two vivid landmarks that surround a stretch of meander or exploration. Fold the narrative so that those two landmarks are now brought together, either into tight adjacency or placed one into the other, so that what might have been a simple event is now complex, or what might have been distant events are now happening in the same timespace. The stretch that has been valley folded to make this joining is now either a hidden or supportive space. Call the edge parts the joined event. Call the hidden parts the fold.

Consider two things:

(1) How can you come upon this joined event in the telling of your story? If there’s a new force or vividness to it, does that call for a rethink of how it appears or occurs, whether just in its local framing of the paragraphs around it, or in the larger framing of the entire event sequence that precedes it? Could it be a beginning? How does the fold influence your understanding of the joined event, without having to be shown to the light or actually explained? Or does the fold work to discard that understanding, so that your joined event is free of its prior tethering in cause or explanation?

(2) What follows from here? How does this set up a potential tone or energy for a sequence of events to follow? Or does it want to be a microstory or miniature, a single compact event, complete in itself? 

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?