Day 5: Textile Draft

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Today we write the textile draft. A day to weave, to compose with intention, and to step aside from the last four day’s mode of being the happy receiver at the fountain of impulse and image. Today is the day to bring in our judgment and our care. As you write, be sure to remember that judgment—one of your most precious resources as a writer—is a form of care, and not a form of censorship or an expression of fear or acquiescence to an authority external to your own.

Before you begin today’s process—which is quite involved—take a few minutes to ground yourself in a sense of where your imperatives meet the play’s imperatives. What is important to you to bring into being in this form? What has the play demanded of you? What has it asked you to be honest about? Where do you need to dig in order to fulfill something it’s brought forward?

Procedure

Today’s procedure follows three steps.

Step 1: Thread Bank

Imagine pulling apart the two existing drafts so that where you had fabric now you have a pile of thread—the bank from which you will weave your third and final draft.

Our process for dismantling will be to collapse the material of both drafts into lists. These lists become an inventory of the play’s images, its events, its information, its places, its songs, its keywords, its objects—all decoupled from the scenes or passages they first appeared in, which will allow us to once again find a freedom (as we did in the architectonic drafts) with respect to how the play unfolds in time.

The simplest version of this process is to gather a pile of paper strips, give each one a heading for a type of material, and trawl each play in turn, recording items under each heading. There is a downloadable PDF with list templates you can use, although there’s no reason to be constrained by my lists. You know your play better than I do; you know what its relevant categories are.

Possible categories: events, vivid images, lines or phrases you love, characters, moments of energetic shift, patterns, figures or themes, poetic modes, counterpoints or polarities, questions raised, special props or objects, places rendered or places referenced, moments of conjuring, periods of rest…

Additionally, for each character, make a character sheet on which to record the skeleton key to their way of being. Don’t be seduced by the idea that every character should possess total consistency, but do think about each character in terms of their habits and ways of responding to pressures, internal or external.

Your lists are a new way to see what the stuff is you’ve made your play from.

Step 2: New Outline with Thread Notes

Assert a new outline. If you have time, it can help to make a very simple outline of both the musical and architectonic drafts first.

I like to do this on many scraps of paper or index cards, so I can play with order as I do.

Give one piece of paper to each scene or section. On the scene paper, note what needs to be woven into the scene: objects, information, images, events—anything from the thread bank lists. As you make these notes, try to detach yourself from any obligation to replicate the way you unfolded the story in the two previous drafts (though of course, you may choose to preserve and transfer forward whatever you like). These outline scene pages should have only high-level ingredients. As you populate each page, consider the following angles:

  • Think about how the play patterns and primes itself.
  • Think about when grounding, contextualizing information is given and how much is needed.
  • Think about the possibility of collapsing disparate scenes into one.
  • Think about the possibility of giving lines spoken by one character to another.
  • Think about the ordering of images.

Step 3: Slow Writing

The textile draft is an opportunity to significantly change tempos, and to benefit from the fresh perspective on care and composition that a slower tempo brings. In the musical draft, we were improvising start to finish. In the architectonic draft, we allowed ourselves some foresight and planning, but still wrote in sketches and with a prospective freedom. In the textile draft, we approach the process of keying in each line as if it is a beautiful, delicate performance.

Arrange your writing space so that you have, in a semi-circle around you or pinned to the wall: your thread bank lists, your outline pages, printed copies of your last two drafts.

For this draft, give yourself a little mental script: read (the outline, the thread bank), write (a sentence or two), read (the outline, the thread bank), write (another sentence or two). Eyes, hands, eyes, hands.

Deliberateness

Let this writing session be one in which you consider every line, every word. You may end up transferring whole swaths of material forward from your musical or architectonic drafts—just copying it down to the line. But be intentional about every word you preserve from your prior drafts. I strongly recommend re-typing every line in your play rather than copying and pasting.

Read the line, hear it in your mind’s ear, type it out. Tune the line now; adjust it if it doesn’t sound right. This is the time for fine-tuning. This is the time for your editor to appear—not the mean one, but the honest one, the one who takes pleasure in your writing and says try again when needed. Remember, between every few lines of the new draft—this is the slow part—glance over your array of thread bank lists and scene pages to see if anything can wants to be incorporated; you might find that something you’d associated with one scene or character wants to reinvent itself in the scene you are writing.

In the textile draft, the space from line to line is the point of possibility and incursion. The instrument is your ear. The resource is your thread bank.

Care for your play.

Maybe the only fundamental thing about a play is that it happens in time. How do you play the timeline?

Share and Respond

Repeat the process from the last two drafts, with one added element: writers can ask questions of their readers, if desired. If you are working solo, take a breather from your draft, and then ask yourself some questions—of you as your own reader, but also questions you can reopen next time you sit down to write.

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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?