3-Draft Workshop: Musical/Architectonic/Textile

M/A/T Week One: Collecting, Trawling

This week is dedicated to your ear, your eye, your interest. The presiding genies of the week are Joseph Cornell and Agnes Varda. This week you will be a dumpster diver, a gleaner, and a spelunker of your own memory caverns. The idea is to provide yourself with things that appeal to your imagination on a variety of scales—from shiny things and neat words to imprints of events. Whether you are planning to write something from scratch or to build a new lobe or layer of an existing story, please be willing to gather the accidental and whimsical alongside the intentional and deliberate without pre-judging their relative seriousness.

Why collect?

To begin by collecting is to approach writing as a process of responding to the world by gathering from the world. To begin by collecting is to provision yourself with something outside yourself that still, in its track through your attention, tells you something about your eye, your ear. So I collect as a starting place. I also stop to collect when my ideas of where I’m going have become overly formed and I need to introduce some breadth, widen the circumference of my vision so the thing doesn’t collapse in on itself, and gain a new angle of approach and axis of vision. I also collect because collecting leaves marks of the time and place of the writing on the writing. I like having this record of places I’ve been in and seasons I’ve lived through woven into my work. 

Dual-channel attention

Try to oscillate between inward and outward attention this week. If you find yourself too much in one channel, choose or invent exercises that look at its alternate.

Stay in low gear

This week is really oriented toward just making a treasure trove of things that can become materially useful to your story or essay. Next week we’ll activate a combinatory mode to let all this material start to organize itself into voices, characters, event sequences, ruminations, rule structures… but allow yourself as much as possible to resist directing or editing this week, even if what you’re getting on the page feels far afield or destined for the scrap heap.

Process for the week

 Devote each writing session this week to collecting. You want to come out of this week with an accumulated stash of words, phrases, images. Even a very short session is useful. If possible, let at least one day stretch for a few hours so that you pass through the whim and the boredom and the process becomes task-like, mechanical, maybe even meditative. 
 
The entire 5-week series is iterative, but the first two weeks rely most heavily on a dedication to setting up task-like procedures and then following them simply. I started formalizing this process as a way to divert beginning playwriting students from writing emo scenes where people shout about how they feel back and forth to each other, to activate the sense that writing is made from stuff and that the stuff can germinate and produce a story of much more life and resonance than the overdetermined illustrations of human failure (or alternately sadness-free aliens+D&D skits) they assumed they had to write if they wanted to make a drama. This process aims at writing made from found stuff that germinates living matter which is then built into a play/story/essay through different waves of compositional thinking that allow themselves to proceed without overdetermined end points. 

The Range

 A set of exercises you can use are linked at the bottom of this email, but you can also make your own exercises to replace or augment my offerings that tune themselves to these values and cover this range: 
 
—Lists or inventories of words and names and phrases. These can be culled from a source or called up from your brain. 
 
—Inventories of places, types of places and the figures that might inhabit them. These can be culled from a source or called up from your brain. 
 
—Images, details, maps, people surfaced from the contents of your memory. These can be found through directed recall exercises, using sense memory or associative tracking activities to find what you didn’t remember you remember. The goal is to reach memory places that haven’t yet been consolidated into stories. 
 
—Real talk with yourself about the contents of your own mind, the habits of your imagination, the questions that matter to you right now. 

Trawling

At the end of the session, trawl. Read over everything you just wrote, and with a different-colored pen (or using the highlighter function if you’re in a doc) circle words, phrases, and images that appeal to you. This gives you a short-hand map to find the shiny stuff in the heap. 

Devise a Collecting/Tuning/Generating Game that belongs to this project alone

After a few days of collecting and seeing what kinds of directions capture your interest, devise for yourself a particular collecting practice that can belong to this project. This practice is somewhere between a collecting exercise and a ritual opening of the writing session—the idea is that you could continue doing this at the beginning of each writing session over the entire five weeks. 

The parameters are really wide open, but I strongly suggest limiting and specifying the practice by framing it with physical materials that are simple and defined, like index cards, a list of a specific number (10, 37, 100…), a timer, an 8.5×11 sheet of paper… The practice needn’t take too long to do, a 5- or 10-minute task is plenty. 

Bonus points if this devised practice leaves you with something pleasingly beautiful, something a little decorated. (If you’re feeling resplendently witchy you might want to check out the preparatory practices in CA Conrad’s A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon for inspiration and permission to resplend.)

The Hard Sell One More Time

These collections help widen the path of your writing mind. Sometimes that’s just through useful games, a little mental twister (for example, how do I incorporate the full name of a person I knew before I was eight years old (that’s a Wayne Koestenbaum parameter) in this libretto about glaciers?) These games simultaneously ask you to find new relevant sources and refresh your angle of approach to what you’re writing. They create breadth and dimensionality.
 
But also, collecting invites incursion across the borders or membranes of your writing mind, invites another temperament, another knowledge, another interest into your own temperament, knowledge, and interest. Let the Collector, addressing her generously as if gracing a monument, enlarge your writing “I,” your eye, your ear. Let her introduce you to moods you did not know you passed through. 
 


 




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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?