Caregiving Tips for Your Whale Fall

I am thinking about caring for bodies // What makes up the body of your story? 

This workshop has been built around two elements: an analogy of life cycle and succession drawn from the phenomenon of whale fall, and a three-stage proposal for moving through the writing process: conjure/collect, assemble, and now caregive. These three words are variations on another three-stage drafting approach whose words were drawn from Walter Benjamin’s observation that writing moves through a “musical” stage in which it is composed, an “architectonic” stage in which it is built, and a “textile” one in which it is woven. I’d always written intuitively from within the soup of the draft; I am temperamentally a musical-architectonic thinker, working material either by deletion or constantly combing it and sprouting new images in its available spaces, or jumping toward larger spaces of new possibility, and improvising. So the textile was an invitation to deliberateness and retrospection that helped me experience revision in a new key, as deploying a wave of thought capable moving back across the writing instead of an impulse looking only forward. 

With this workshop I’ve been thinking a lot about lightness, especially with respect to the atmosphere of productivity-mindedness that can suffuse the way we think about whether or not we’re really doing the writing. This last approach proposes a series of “passes” — literally of passing from start to finish through the draft as it stands, making adjustments along the way. It might help to think about each pass as having limited tools, like cleaning or grooming. You wouldn’t try to wash the dishes with the windex or cut your hair with your nail clippers; approach each pass through your draft with a similarly limited or targeted attention. In writing terms, this might mean a pass through only looking at adjectives, a pass through only looking at how the clauses of a sentence fit together, a pass through thinking about sonority, a pass through where you play with the order of things in a sentence or paragraph or the whole, a pass where you consider typography, punctuation, open and closed spaces, a pass through with only the tool of deletion. 

Each pass is a single, focused task; the complexity of the draft comes from their accumulation. Each pass allows you to include or exclude by temporarily centering a limited set of questions.

Maybe, to linger in the caregiving analogy, you can also consider this stage of the process a kind of companionship. Can you slowly and patiently read it through a few times, maybe even aloud, before you start making changes, or even every time you make a pass, read the resulting draft aloud with care and patience? Would it be useful to copy it by hand, make an illustrated poster of it or of some extracts of it, so that you can linger on the words not only from the standpoint of sense and their combinatory usefulness, but also the arches and curves and lines that make up each of their letters, rendered there in your best handwriting? 

Below are some ideas for choosing ways to pass through your draft to take care of it. Use a few, use them all, use one… or play the analogy yourself and propose other ways to attend to this body of words that makes up your whale fall. Allow yourself to think of each pass as a task to be done to get this body into a place of comfort — but don’t let the gentleness of that image overdetermine the mood you are going for: comfort for your story might be that it attains its full wildness or jaggedness. The body you might imagine in the caregiving analogy could be one of any age or state. 

The goal is to arrive, in as few or many passes as you please, at a sense of completion. Not just an endpoint for your story, but also a sense of satisfaction. 
 

SOME PASSES

Proportion (of the sections in relation to each other, of the relative balance of the timespans that derived from the scavenger-opportunist-colonist phases)

Circulation (how images or figures or information circulates through; if something is swelling up one section at the expense of another, can you remedy and rebalance it so it pervades the whole thing instead?)

Something to rest on (maybe this is a question of story signals about context — context of what kind of story this is, where it sits in the library of all possible kinds of stories)

Cleanness (this might be the time to take a sentence-level view, looking at word choice, pruning or clarifying at the level of the word or phrase)

Bathroom break (time to discard some mass?)

Warmth (consider the heat sources—what warms and energizes the action or the telling? maybe this is a question about the storytelling voice? or maybe it’s a question about being given adequate food to reach a workable metabolism)

Vista (what is this thing looking out upon that a reader looks out on in turn? how wide is that field? this might be a time to return to the language of “succession” in the source analogy, the communities that succeed each other, the way this whale fall, while an epic, is also a single action of decomposition: what is the largest frame in which to consider these successions and/or what follows?)

Good cup (does it need stimulating? relaxing? what state of tension is right?)

Company (is it sunk in its own solitude? would the appearance of a friend cheer it up, perhaps in the form of a nod or wave to another story?)

G’morning, G’nite (have you greeted it well? have you taken your leave of it in the way you want?)

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?