3-Draft Workshop: Musical/Architectonic/Textile

Week Five: Textile Draft

I’m way behind, still stumbling through my musical draft of the segment I’m trying to write, but thanks to some deep under-employment about to kick in I hope to jump back in with saintly intensity and get myself through these drafts. Obviously, this pelagic school, being pop-up, remote, and totally without obligation except in the promises we make to ourselves or our pods, leaves plenty of room to take these newsletters and their idea of “weeks” in the timeframes in which they’re useful and to defer them if needed.

Of the three ways of working that belong to the three drafts, the textile has been the most revelatory to me lately. Often when I’m leading workshops I find the architectonic is the most fun because it reminds of a freedom that we don’t always remember they can take. But being a rather poorly-behaved person with respect to best practices, I work in the reverse; I’m really good at drastically free re-imaginings of things and less inclined to work the material into a fine shape that satisfies both what I need out of the thing (which has something to do with opening up a clear space where the singing happens as well as just the pleasure of surprise and reward of persistence) and what other people who are not already devotees at the temple of pelagic free-float might need to make it through a story and find some meaning in it and feel it is worth their time to read or watch.

For years, my revision process was one of sifting, sort of starting back at the beginning each time I sat down to write and re-hearing the sentences, also writing through delete, delete, since I tend to need to iterate each thought three times on the first pass. This sifting and deleting works very well for something that is meant to be taken always in close focus, always on ground level. I could hear when things wanted to iterate and weave and so handle its larger relationship to itself in time. I was also mostly for 1+ hour pieces of performance and could hold that duration in my head pretty intuitively, having spent so many years working in that timeframe. In the last few years, I’ve been working on longer form stories that have more threads of information and accumulation of consequence in them (cf plot), and I find the textile approach helps me handle all those layers in a complex way, especially the question of how to unfold information and event and when, and how the image and pattern warp and weft of the thing act as a gravitationally strong surface upon which the sequence of things can be laid out.

I also like that it’s a later stage of revision that still leaves a great deal of room for re-thinking and new solutions—it’s not just tightening something up, refining, although I find that I tend to come out of the textile stage with a pretty refined page.

So ends my sales pitch for the textile. Here’s how you do it.

The key work of the textile stage is to weave the piece into itself.

The basic stages of the textile as I conceive it are:

  1. A dismantling of both musical and architectonic drafts (and possibly a recuperation of other notebook traces) into inventories and lists;
  2. A reassertion of a new outline with key elements from those inventories attached to each scene;
  3. A slow writing practice in which the entire thing is rewritten (copy and paste is forbidden in the strict version of this although exact transfer of sentences is not).

Notes on those three elements of the sequence:

Dismantling

Imagine unravelling the thing you have made back into threads. Call these lists the thread bank. I make lists of categories: images, events, appearances, recurrences, dialogic energies, shiny things I love, locations, questions, characters. The print-yr-own is a blank template for you to use to make your thread bank, with some definition of those elements and more. If you don’t want to use my template, the important thing is to separate out the pieces, so that you can freely re-locate elements to different scenes, and freely combine or re-order the elements of the play.

Reassertion

I often do a quick reverse outline* of both my musical and architectonic drafts before this step. Then I make a new outline of the draft I plan to write, using a separate sheet for each scene or section (half page, quarter page depending on your handwriting), on which I record location, key event, information, population, and then cull possible elements to include from my threadbank. This reassertion is the time to rethink the flow of information in your piece, and the possibility of re-ordering, replacing, or combining scenes. As I wrote above, I tend to write first by making a giant, redundant pile of stuff, and often I can take ten scenes and collapse them into one or two at this stage. This stage also repeats some of the questions of the architectonic draft with respect to what is focalized and what is not, and the shape and sequence of your telling. This difference here is that you are being less whimsical and more intentional, and you are allowing the leading concern to be making sense, building curiosity or complexity or whatever ity belongs to this project, and deploying information in sequence.

(*A reverse outline is just an outline made in retrospect from the thing you wrote, rather than an outline that helps you plan what you’re about to write. It’s a regular feature of all college writing centers and that’s where I learned to love it.)

Slow Writing

I am utterly devoted to the redundancy of this slow writing practice: once you have your reasserted outline, begin at the beginning in a fresh file. Surround yourself with your thread bank lists (arrayed around you so you can keep perusing them) and a printed copy of earlier versions of the material in this scene, if there is one. Write fresh or transfer old material forward, but re-type every word. Every few lines, glance at your threadbank lists that are arrayed around you like a magic semicircle. Is there something that you could weave in here?

Speak what you’re writing aloud after each sentence. As you transfer, you may find yourself re-shaping the sentences, trimming or augmenting them, or tossing and rewriting them. I like to practice accumulation as I read. So, write line 1. Say line 1 aloud (or mouth it), then write the next line. Then say lines 1 and 2 aloud, and go on to line 3, and so on. If you are writing a script for speech, it’s especially important that you write through your mouth and ear in this stage. The point of the accumulation is to keep vetting how each line builds from what precedes it.

As you patiently weave with your sparkling recombinatory intelligence, set a priority on tuning your ear. Don’t move forward until you’ve gotten the line right. (This doesn’t mean you can’t take another pass through, obviously, just that if in early drafts we valorized velocity and knew we could toss stuff, this time we’re working in the counter-mood.)

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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?