being your own reader

being your own reader

pleasure

I believe pretty fervently that the early stages of a creative process should not be subjected to any kind of value judgment (this is good, this is bad). Let’s say value judgment is just a wing (and not the crown) of our larger capability and necessity to discern as a primary element of our thinking. Allowing for the probability that exploratory material will be discarded or transformed, and appreciating how nascent and partial the early material is, I try to train the reflex to discern on pleasure and curiosity. What generates pleasure, what has energy, what draws me forward, enlivens my curiosity? By tuning into pleasures and giving attention to the appearance of emergent living processes (surprise, complexity, growth) in our stories or storytelling, we develop the taproots that will provide for the longterm health of the thing. We also make space for something new to happen in our writing, because good and bad really only belong to retrospective analysis, so when we make those judgments of fresh writing, all we’re doing is saying whether what we got onto the page aligns with something we encountered the past that we liked or disliked. 

I also fervently believe that this pleasure tuning should be tuned to one’s own frequency, that is, other people’s pleasure is not relevant here. To survive the writing, to stay interested, to commit to co-piloting the emergent thing, we need to be rooted in our own authority to say yes.

markup for pleasure

I’m taking this markup style directly from Wayne Koestenbaum, the patron saint of the pleasure and desire portions of this reflection. I had the good fortune to work with Wayne at the CUNY Grad Center. If you give a piece of paper with your writing on it to Wayne, it will come back with two notations: wavy lines under sentences or phrases of particular delight, or exclamation marks in the margins where the writing moves with power or surprise. This markup creates a kind of heat map of a piece of writing in its meeting with this reader. It told me something about what parts of my writing had the most life stuff. By omission, I saw also what parts were more leaden—usually the passages playing at high theory. 

Print out your draft (I really think the paper part is necessary; let the hand into the process) and, before any other kind of evaluation, give it a pleasure markup with wavy lines for prose and exclamation marks for rhetorical or structural movement. Extra pleasure for using a pleasing and not-red pen to do this. Green or purple, perhaps. 

As you read and mark, remember this is not an inventory of what you plan to keep. It’s a heat map of this draft. Go back at the end of read back through, skimming only the parts you’ve marked up. What is it that’s active in those places? What moves freely in those places? Write yourself a note about that activity, that freedom.  

dissatisfaction

At what point is it time to invite discernment or judgment into a process, and on what terms do we license judgment (our own or others’) to say yes or no? Can we keep yes and no distinct from the unhelpful good and bad? The invitation of judgment into the process, for me, marks the beginning of revision. 

If we trust our pleasure to propel us through the first stages of a writing process, perhaps revision is a time to trust our dissatisfactions too. Trusting dissatisfaction—acknowledging its presence—is not the same thing as judging portions of our material as bad. Think of it instead as the pleasure tuning fork returning no answer. There’s a yes and a blank. If it returns a blank, then what occupies this space in the draft is not-yet yes. We can abandon it, we can re-approach it, we can replace it. We can re-envision it. Considered in this way, dissatisfaction is a helpful tool—not demoralizing or deflating, dissatisfaction is an honest agitation that helps us keep moving. 

markup for dissatisfaction

I like to put square brackets around material that I’m unsatisfied by. The square brackets give it a volumetric space, open the possibility that something else might occupy this. Instead of pointing you toward ego death, let square brackets telegraph the message, stay tuned, something more/else here. 

Stay open to the possibility that a pleasure-marked passage might show up in a larger square bracketed expanse. These don’t have to be mutually exclusive categories. 

desire

One of the super boring things that happens in critique-oriented feedback relationships is that other people tell you what your writing lacks, or what they, as a reader, want. (It gets extra boring here because this desire diagnostic is often made by a writer masquerading as a reader, that is, they’re telling you what they would do if they were the writer of this thing, which they are not. You are.) Language like I want… and It needs… are red flags that indicate that a pre-existing value system has been invisibly imported into the room. It indicates an assumption that you’re trying to build a facsimile of something whose composition is already understood. (And further, that the understanding is an accurate roadmap for a reconstruction.)

Okay, want, lack, and desire are synonyms. But to whereas want and lack create a subtractive, impoverished mood, for me desire has other valences. I say desire not as a lack engine but as an attractive force, a movement toward. If want and lack have reachy hands, let desire have open ears and eyes, let it have legs. 

What if, in those bracketed places where dissatisfaction has given its honest answer, you tuned toward desire? What has the force of attraction here? What curiosities are present? What would soothe or energize or otherwise come to life here? 

markup for desire

Take another pass through your draft, and pausing at both places of pleasure and dissatisfaction, ask what the writing desires. I do mean what the writing desires, and not what the reader desires. (The writing as an irreducibly complex object made at the meeting place between you who put words on a page and the body of words you’ve managed to leave on a page, existing outside your ideas about them or your intentions with them.) Record these desires in the margins as questions: what-ifs and what-abouts and can-we’s. You can think through sensation (what if we lingered here, what if we took a nap right here, what if we burst into a sprint here, what if we had dessert here). You can think about company (what if we met someone else here, what if we called our mothers here, what if we greeted our neighbors here). You can think about activity (what if we shouted from the top of a tower here, what if we planted a seed here, what if we did a jig here). What else can you think through to tune into the writing’s desire?

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?