3-Draft Workshop: Musical/Architectonic/Textile

Week Four: Architectonic Draft

I looked up architectonic again to see if it was substantively different in meaning from architectural and the answer is, not really. It was fading out of use and it has come back into use, and sometimes it is used particularly to mean related to the study of architecture (beyond just being related to or seeming to possess an architecture in some way). One phrasing I found was that the architectonic describes anything “serviceable to the construction of buildings.” I like the open spirit of this phrasing; it matches what my understanding of the use of these keyword draft names from Benjamin: to find any way in which they help build the thing. The Greek arkhitekton that English borrows carries the sense of the builder-craftsperson-carpenter as much or more as of the designer. For our purposes, be both.

This week of work is characterized by zooming out, trying to catch a sense of the potential design and pathway of the story we’re telling. A lot of the thinking is fairly abstract; grab onto whatever works for you and discard what doesn’t. The overview introduces the different perspectives to entertain this week. I’ve also made guided mapping exercises both in audio and print-yr-own forms this week.

This week we exercise freedom to play with shape. I often tell people to think of this draft as a weird cousin to the draft you just wrote. It needn’t be a midpoint between the musical and the textile drafts in a progressive sense. It might just be research. It exists mostly to challenge ourselves to de-constrain our understanding of the scope of what we’re doing and to use visual metaphors to find new possible approaches to story telling and sequence.

I like to use the word “shape” because to me, it feels less abstract and more workable than words like “form” and “structure.” Feel free to substitute another word that creates a sense of permission and possibility for you. (Ralph Lemon, a hero of mine, uses the word “container” for the same sense of limiting parameters.)

We’re going to think about:

—The shape of the story. What can happen in this story? What are its available pathways and possible outcomes?

—The shape of the telling. How do we move through the telling. What is brought into focus? How do we order the telling? How do we pace and measure its internal proportions?

THE ASSIGNMENT

Here’s the only thing I insist on as necessary the architectonic draft: entertain the metaphor of a building by thinking of your story as a building. A scene or a passage or a section = a room, a wing. The experience of watching, listening or reading = a house tour. The necessity for this draft is that you allow yourself to discover a new chamber you never knew existed in this house. Swap out “chamber” for “room,” “bunker,” “garden,” “atrium,” “ballroom,” “closet,” “corridor,” “portal,” or “view from the roof” as needed. But be rigorous with yourself about finding an utterly new space within this thing. You’re not committed to preserving the new space in your final draft, just to discovering it in this one.

THREE AREAS

(The linked audio exercises lead you through mapping/brainstorming variations on each of the following areas to consider.)

1. AVAILABLE PLOTS

Consider

In phd school I took a class called “Heroines of Disaster,” which looked at several waves of feminist writing. One of the things that stuck with me was the idea of available plots. In older fiction, so the story went, there were only these options for women protagonists: marriage on the one hand, and madness or death on the others. All the ladies who wanted their freedom got madness or death (or both!) because there was no available freedom plot. In this sense, plot really means pathway to outcome. What are the possible pathways a character can take, what are the possible outcomes for that character’s life? Pathway here entails something built out of pressures, restrictions, affordances, and opportunities.

            Now I doubt you’re busy rewriting Jane Eyre* (maybe you are?), but ask yourself what assumptions you’ve made about what can happen in the path of your characters or your argument, about what constitutes a happy or tragic ending in this path. Where have you assumed your story stops? How do you get it in motion? What have you not considered? Whether you want to embrace or reject generic conventions here, try to get an honest assessment of how you understand the horizon of your story and of what constitutes an ending to the story according to your musical draft.

Propose

Propose to yourself some alternative pathways your story might avail itself of. And/or commit to the pathway you’ve already chosen but with a new sense of what else could have happened. Thinking inside the story world of the play (by “story world” I mean everything that belongs to the larger world of the story whether or not it’s focalized in the telling of it), find a new way to define the shape of the plot, understanding plot as pathway(s) to outcome(s).

[*I would like to shout out to Kate Benson’s play PORTO here, which so beautifully chucks the old path. Reader, I left the apartment.]

[If you would like a little comparative dramatic structure fun for generating alternate pathways and availabilities, here’s a link to my in-progress dramatic structure comix.]

2. FOCAL POINTS and CONNECTIVE TISSUE

Consider

Consider the movement of your telling of the story — where you start, where you move, how you put things in a sequence separate from the chronology of events in your story world. Consider the places your telling could move, if you think about deep time and far space. How tightly do you focus on a set of events; how broad is the span of elements that join to form the telling? Even if you’re following ye olde Aristotelian best-practices advice of tracking action over the course of no more than a few days, there are innumerable ways to parse the time and space of that telling. What’s happening at 4am?

Identify & Propose

Identify places of focalization in your next telling of this story. You might choose different moments of focalization than what you wrote into for your musical draft. Think of the focalizations as illuminated areas within a much larger zone of the story world (with all the context, research, backstory, relation, and microdetail implied by the worldness of the story world). Then consider the syntax of how one focalization follows the last. What are the hinges, joints, and folds between these areas of focus? Imagine alternative syntaxes of connection: gliding, leaping, dovetailing, suturing…? Go back to the question from the response guidelines – what are this story’s verbs? Might the answer to that question give you a permission to intensify or embrace a way of moving through the story? How do you want it to move? To loop? To freefall? To spelunk? To guide? To misdirect? To ration?

3. VISUAL RESOURCE

Find something that could act as a visual resource for you to invent your own story form or adhere to one you like. Let that visual resource help you imagine a constraint that will determine the answers to consideration areas 1 & 2 (the available plots and the path of the telling). Trawl the digital archives of a museum collection. This is a way of working that I like to take very very far, really embracing the constraint, but you can also hide the constraint, embrace it really subtly.

            I find the easiest way to put this idea into action is to use the phrase “a play in the form of a ______.” What pleases your eye? Do you like symmetry? Do you like boundaries? Do you like overlay? Do you like panorama? Do you like networks? Do you like palimpsests? How much freedom to move (the path, the outcome, the telling) can you gain from a visual source? Remember the freedom to move can also be a freedom to abandon the pressure of moving in dramatic ways. The scale can become large or small.

Draw or Diagram

Make a sketch outline of your story in the form of the resource you’ve chosen. Put it in front of you as you write.

COMBINING

After you’ve thought through each of these perspectives, perhaps looping through them twice to let the later ones influence the earlier ones, decide something about the shape of your story. Once you start to write, bring your focus primarily to the shape of the telling.

Two practical things:

—Transfer useful material from your musical draft to a new file—this is a save-as draft. You want to be able to look at both of them before starting the textile draft.

—Write freely and quickly in the architectonic phase. Sketch rather than detail. Overview rather than surface texture.

Happy building,

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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?