3-Draft Workshop: Musical/Architectonic/Textile

Week Three: Musical Draft

Gather your compost and treasure heaps, friends. It’s time to take our first pass through this thing. No matter how much or little you’ve done so far, consider yourself ready to write the draft. Use some of the collecting or constellating exercises from the last few weeks as warmups if you want, but give yourself permission to move forward now. If you have a pre-writing ritual going, keep it up.

This week’s print-yr-own is in the mode of the Oblique Strategies [http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html]  but you can always just go straight to the source. That’s my favorite web 1.0 hypercard deck linked there.

Your task this week is to write a draft of your project. The three-draft structure of this workshop plays off Walter Benjamin’s articulation of the stages of work on his prose: “a musical one when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.”

So how do we understand the musical stage? Here are a few different ideas, which can be taken singly, in combination, or set aside for another intuition you might have about how to enter the musical compositional mind of this draft.

Improvisational composition approach

Think about improvisational music forms. As musicians find their way thorugh the improvisation, the task isn’t just to be in the moment (though that kind of altertness and flexibility is necessary) but also to track what’s been laid down that can be taken up, taken out, taken somewhere new. In this approach, you remind yourself to be alert to compositional refrains or patterns and the way that material or themes can re-appear. Think of each writing session as an improvisational composition, don’t move backwards to edit or change; write forward in high alert for refrain and all that you can do with it: finding, following, transforming, returning, bringing to a close. (Please add many other verbs to that list as befits your mood.)

Sonority approach

Taking the sound part of music hyper-literally, imagine that if you are writing prose this thing will be read aloud, and if you are writing a play script then think all about the sound of the voices. Luxuriate in finding sentence, scene, and plot analogs for pitch, tune, harmonics, rhythm, tempo, voicing (which instruments play which parts). What key is this thing written in? Which mode? Is it murder ballad or prog rock? Is it consonant or dissonant? Answer all of these questions through word choice, through the way one word sits next to another.

Coetaneous growth approach

I wrote a little about this in last week’s overview, the proposal that we allow our draft to grow from several places at once, either throughlines you haven’t yet integrated, or starting from places that feel like middles or endings as well as exploring beginnings. My reasoning behind this is twofold: first, it helps to head off any excesses of deliberateness (which I like to defer to the last stage of the textile), allowing you to leap around more than you might if you started at the beginning and wrote to the end. (Though who knows, maybe you are an impulsive leaper and already possess this freedom.) Second, it creates the potential for complexity, growing layers or sections that you don’t understand the relation of. I often see people who work in the extended dance world working this way, building from a few different sources or starting points and slowly bringing them into a composition. (Com position, to gather together, to position together.) I think it works best when you’re allowing these points of growth to really have their own gravity, so not that you’ve outlined the whole thing and you’re just writing the seventh scene first, but that the thing itself has many points of origin, whose eventual joining becomes a game and an invitation. Why is this musical? Well it’s not really. It belongs to this week’s work because this is the first pass through the draft.

Mood approach

Track the possibilities of thinking—your own and the thinking that belongs to what you’re writing—through mood. What we can think in one mood becomes distant or unthinkable in another. Like musical mode, which defines the scale and the chords that a composition can move through, let a thinking mode define what it is possible to think. In music, the scale comes to us through sequences in melody as well as intervals—the distance between two or more notes played either sequentially or simultaneously. What variables come into play if you switch moods? How many moods can coexist in this thing? Is there a dominant one? Can you dig around and find one you don’t usually experience?

Schedule

Your job is to get to the end of the draft however you can.

Decide on a writing schedule before the week starts.

Try to write every day this week.

Get a printed copy of this workshop over in snail mail

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?