Saint Cards 10

This installment has two separate elements, one linking back to yesterday, one looking elsewhere. If you’re just looking for the prompt, scroll down.

1) An account (given in retrospect) of an accidental decontrolling strategy for conjuring a character.

2) A new approach to the old prompt.

Account of a summoning

I tend to make contact with emergent characters first through a kind of running commentary that gives voice to an internal stream of thought — I try to hear voices. Sometimes I openly throw my own voice into theirs, but other times characters have appeared who are not made of me, even though to hear their voice I have to volunteer myself as their conduit, their amanuensis. In one instance, I found a character accidentally in a notebook, left over from a writing warmup I’d led in a playwriting class. Exactly what the warmup was, I can’t remember—I’m guessing it was some kind of word listing (maybe words beginning with W or compounds with W words— it included things like “wallboy” and “wintered over”), but I recognized the what I’d written as obviously incorporating a set of words I’d probably circled from a larger word recall list that had only a formal relation to each other, and had to problem solve them into a paragraph. The weird bold connectivity that was required to link all these words conjured a mood, a voice. I don’t remember grasping that voice whenever I did the exercise initially, but when I was scanning through my old notebooks looking for forgotten seeds of something, I found it, and there she was. It was like the old paragraph was a pokemon ball. Everything that followed for that character was given life by that bold, mood and tone I found in the paragraph. I let it be my first paragraph and spun forward from there. 

So the retrospective strategy is a chain: 

1) gathering of words based on some formal link or pleasure in sound, gathering from language and not from character thinking; 

2) combining of selected words into a dense object, taking pleasure in the sentence casing that connects them;

3) listening to the artifact of their combination for a mood, an appetite, a wit, a feeling of voice or person.

How does this relate to the considerations of the last nine days? Well I see it as a kind of going fishing in the vast resource of language, beginning in vocabulary and following connectivity, syntax into voice. Language, the sharing of language, the growing up into a communicative world, is one of the primary substrates of the social domain in which any I and you or I-you comes to exist, to make sense. By starting with vocabulary and formal contraints that aren’t driven by meaning or interpretation, as a writer you find a starting point outside your own intention. By spinning a character’s life force out of the materials of language, you make a character whose own starting point is grounded in this big social, relational resource—as opposed, to say, a character whose starting point is a type of person, the liability of which is that types always have prefab scripts on hand to ventriloquize, whether that’s mafia dude type or Karen on the phone type or Q follower type or anytype else. Those prefab scripts are great for legibility, but can get in the way of fullness.

New approach to an old prompt and a last look through the prism of Butler’s thinking

The impetus for this workshop was the desire to memorialize, but so far I have been lingering on ideas from Butler’s groundwork for a self. Time to bring it around to memory. Do this prompt for someone who is gone. As always, it can be taken up for a fictional someone or a real someone you have lost. The question comes from Butler: Who am I without you? If we are made of our relations to each other, then when someone goes missing, some part of us goes missing too. To write memorial, I think, means taking a measure of that missing part. 

Conjure a departed figure in mind, whether real or imagined, and then turn your attention to the person who is still there. Combining portrait and text, write a short piece that maps an empty space left behind, a space in the one who is still here that was once filled by the person who is gone. 

Open variables:

Presence: the thought experiment passes through a kind of story form (“imagine a scene”), but the endpoint of the prompt is toward a record not of what happened or didn’t happen, but of the presence of that figure; the thought experiment is a instrument for getting near in order to register the figure, their effects on others. What’s registered as presence? Think of this open variable as a continuum between radiance (as overwhelming outflow from one to another), reciprocity (as feedback loop between two or more), and withdrawal (of one from another). 

Short: invitation to treat this as a tiny daily exercise—limit it by minutes spent, word count, or page space. This workshop is not cumulative, so you can take up the scale and limit differently each time you choose to write.

Piece: you might write a microstory, a caption, a song, a dialogue, a commemoration, a tiny play, a choreographic score, a meditation or prayer of some kind, a list of images, notes for a character study, or any other form useful to you as a container for this presence.

Figure: is the figure real or invented; gone and remembered or still living; is the figure mapped onto the fullness of a person or does the figure appear as something different than “full” in this sense (a slip, a ghost, an allegory, a disembodied voice, a half-memory, a dream composite…)

Portrait: The portrait might be a description drawn in words, separate or integrated into the rest. It might be a drawing or a collage, or a performed photograph you take of yourself, in the style of Cindy Sherman.

Grammatical person: are you writing “I” or “we” in first-person, writing “you” in second-person, writing “she/he/they+” in third? Addressed to the past or addressed to the future?

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?