The next time you're at your desk
thinking you should work on such-and-such piece, ask yourself, Does my next
breath come with a genre? Does it come packaged with the label of Short Story
or Screenplay or Sonnet?
Writers should practice not knowing which genre they're about to write.
Not knowing genre joins other
important forms of not-knowing for mindful writing: not knowing the point
of re-entry in a draft (but knowing already which piece one wants to work on);
not knowing which piece one will work on (but knowing the genre of that piece);
and not knowing if one will actually produce any words at all during a writing
session. These types of not-knowing are needed to engage verbal emptiness--the
space/time in which formless turns over to form and vice versa. At the most
basic level, these forms of not-knowing are also necessary to remaining
perceptive of the present while writing.
Notice that I say practice not predicting genre. Don't
get me wrong: maintaining a focus is important. We need to narrow our
intrapersonal to finish pieces. With a mindful writing practice, however, we
allow ourselves numerous opportunities for the opposite of narrowing: a radical
openness to the moment.
What we're trying to do is maximize possibility and reduce
preconceptions, especially what Ellen Langer called premature cognitive
commitments. In Mindfulness, Langer writes about how "mindlessness,
as it diminishes our self-image, narrows our choices, and weds us to
single-minded attitudes, has a lot to do with this wasted potential."
To increase our creative variables and contexts, it's preferable
that we approach each present writing moment with mental windshield wipers that
clear away all. Then we listen for whatever intrapersonal bits and phrases
arise in that moment. By setting up a mind clear of assumptions, we are likely
to hear a greater range of the intrapersonal in that call and response between
our writing selves and the next moment. To remain longer in that state of openness,
we try to not label this new intrapersonal material by genre (on top of trying
of course not to evaluate or critique it).
Without present awareness, genre is a major form of preconception
and nonproductive mindlessness.
Picking genre too early forecloses on
possibility by exponentially and very quickly reducing structural and content
options. Preconceptions freight the writing moment with faulty assumptions and
limiting self-talk. Second only to the preconceptions about our writing ability
that most of us tell ourselves while writing is our preconception about our
genre.
During invention, there's no real need for 100% commitment then & there to
the contexts & people affiliated with certain genre. Those people are not
physically present while you write. Those contexts are not your context while
you write. Our #1 allegiance during invention should be to observing the
ever-changing present moment.
This is especially true of
professional writers and students in school for creative writing. Graduate writing
programs usually ask graduate students to declare their genre and sometimes
undergraduate programs do as well. Genre for writers is a like a pearl: grit of
past experience (a writing class taken in college, a passing compliment, a book
read as a teenager) accumulated layers and layers of actions to make us "a
poet" or "a novelist," and so forth. Actually, a series of
moments accumulated and hardened into what now seems timeless, just how it is,
the personal status quo.
