Genealogies

Genealogies

Use this exercise to discover pressures and directions that can manifest as you revise your story, and to reflect on what kind of narrative intelligence it grows out of.

Everything we do and think is made up of a meeting of habit and newness. When traditions take root, habits are elevated to the status of ceremony (viewed generously) or stricture (viewed rebelliously). We all have some amount of narrative habit embedded deep within us. These habits come to us from the literary language communities we are born into.

Thinking through genealogy is a chance both to examine the narrative habits we’ve inherited or absorbed, and also a chance to experience the formal elegance of other traditions as fresh (to us), unburdened by the weight of our own internalized cultural (or microcultural) norms.

(NB: Viewed from the perspective of story structure, it’s possible to borrow in a way that doesn’t re-enact the problems of unidirectional, acquisitive appropriation. And as much as it is important to interrogate certain habits of appropriation that harden into damaging stereotypes (i.e. Orientalism and other forms of paternalistic fetishizing/silencing) it’s also true that appropriation—the taking of something into your imaginative, creative space and authorizing yourself to make something with its intelligence—and exchange exist in the groundwater of all literary traditions and all literary rebellions.)

Prep

Reflection (5–10 mins): Fastwrite on (that is, write about a focused question steadily, at speed, without editing) or list the story types that form your imagination’s habits. Think about childhood appetites, narratives that belong to your family or community, and the kinds of literature or storytelling you’ve find yourself most immersed in at different points in your life. Think out of discipline too: are there musical or visual forms whose habits you understand? What traditions do you have access to? Read what you’ve written or listed and consider if any of these are informing your play.

Reflection (5–10 minutes): Fastwrite or list (5 mins) a memory recall of stories told that produced an interesting friction for you as a listener/reader, whether that’s a friction of pleasant surprise or deep frustration. Give a name to a tradition those stories might belong to.

Resource: Glance through the pack of dramatic structure comics over in the essay section. Choose one of those structures or make a comic for yourself of another narrative tradition (or artistic tradition, if you want to step outside of literary forms). Note the focus on values and agents of change in each of those structures. What forces or compulsions does each place on a story? If you invited that force into your story, what might swerve or evolve?

Write

Write yourself several micro-assignments that could be produced by this new force. Consider both tiny shifts in the feeling of a scene or interpretation of a character, and large new directions the story could travel. Then write one or more of the micro-assignments into your story.

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?