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.