Self-talk can serve as a type of writing prompt or heuristic. Instead of hoping to immediately arrive at some sort of valley of golden content, talk yourself through to the journey to new material. You might be surprised by how wise and compassionate of a guide you can become for yourself. Imaginative and intelligent work leans on such scaffolding.
In previous posts, I have talked about the need to turn to intrapersonal or internal dialog for content for writing. What I am discussing in this post is turning to that intrapersonal communication to find an inner teacher or guide: someone who "assigns" structure, who is general of the Next Step.
People who write fluently or with ease tend toward process thinking and meta language--both of which could also called "awareness" or "mindfulness" in their own right.
Sometimes we need to stay a little more mindful of the production: we need to hear ourselves ask questions. Questions are the girders of the text we're building. We need to see the Instructions. Just as when a teacher gives you prompts to write (I do this often in the classroom), these commands release you from the total responsibility of coming up with the text. Someone else is handing you the next step; you just listen and "follow directions," writing down whatever arises in response to their suggestion.
In my notebooks, I am constantly asking myself, "What's next?" "What does the poem/article/paragraph want to do next?" (Sondra Perl uses a similar strategy in her book on Felt Sense.)
Writing becomes a sort of command performance, in a good way. A certain liberty is possible: you can throw caution to the wind. After all, these are not your ideas. If the text isn't high quality, that's not completely your fault. And so forth. The responsibility to create a great piece is leveraged a bit onto this other party, this teacher, this guide.
This release from total responsibility for the outcome of writing is in part the allure of formal poetry. Sonnets and their ilk provide a structure; the poet's job is to respond to that structure. In a sense, poems written in form are a heightened act of listening, of call and response.
In Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki speaks of the balance between control and openness. "To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him."
While writing, we do this by assigning ourselves prompts while we write. We ask ourselves helpful, generous questions; more importantly, we remain able to hear ourselves asking those questions so we can respond. Finally, we must be able to accept the response, whatever it is. Don't sort or judge it.
As you write, keep a notebook or screen handy where you can do process notes about the act of writing. In those process notes, ask yourself questions about the text you're working on. Do this regularly, every 20 minutes.
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When
the subject of one's writing is writing, it brings everything closer to
the present moment because what one is doing in the moment is
writing. Like driving a car, most of us tend to not perceive what
we're actually doing when we write. Writing about one's immediate writing
experience = writing about the present. It's an easy way, therefore, to
heighten mindfulness and probably reduce writing anxiety.
Let
the subject, at least in part, be the present moment, and because you are
writing in that moment, the subject becomes writing.
Invariably,
this leads to low-stakes writing or perhaps private writing because you won't
likely be showing this piece to a reader-critic: unless you opt to enclose your
present experience as a writer inside the amber of publication.
When
I was younger and pretty much stuck in a prolonged block, I gravitated toward
poets who mentioned the act of writing within their work. For instance, Octavio
Paz's lines half-way down in his great long poem, "The river":
In
mid-poem a great helplessness overtakes me, everything abandons me,
there
is no one beside me, not even those eyes that gaze from behind me at what I
write,
no
one behind or in front of me, the pen mutinies, there is neither beginning
nor
end nor even a wall to leap,
the
poem is a deserted esplanade.
These
meta moments inside texts helped by basically exiling future critical audiences
and high-stakes situations from the moment. (At the end of my second MFA
program and in desperate search of a full-time teaching job, I also used
Post-Its with the single word "Buddha" or "Present" as
exits into the Now--though I did not formally meditate at the time. I didn't
own a laptop and would go to the basement of a university computer lab to
type up my resume and cover letters, sticking these Post-Its onto the borrowed
monitor.) In my most isolated stretches as a writer, I turned to metalanguage
in my poems as a way to finally break free of audience-in-the-head and write;
later on, the increased awareness of the present afforded by including
metalanguage allowed me to feel the abundance of possibility and relationship
that is writing.
In
my writing journals, nowadays I include notes about process right alongside
ideas and phrases for poems and essays. If I am working on scholarly writing, I
jot down the date and time, some details about my writing area, (ideally,
screened-in back porch as in right now, the rain mumbling, the eggplant
half-fruit, half-blossom), and my private feelings about the project at hand.
During any given writing session, I value those process jottings as much as I value
the ideas or phrases. It's all writing--no sorting or categories needed.
"Yoga
for Hands" is one way to turn to the experience of actually writing as
subject material. (See post from 9/11/2012.) Another way to practice meta-mindfulness
is to do a 7-10 minute freewrite on any topic (you chose) but every 2 or 3
sentences pause and, in parenthesis, pull yourself back to the Now. Write about the Now. Include
details about the space you're writing in, sensory information from that space,
the smell or appearance of ink, the sound of your typing, the heat given off by
the keyboard, etc. Then return to what's outside the parenthesis, to the topic
of your freewrite. Repeat.
