Repost of Keith Hjortshoj's "What Are You Actually Doing" Guest Post

[This guest post is so marvelous--and has attracted quite a few viewers--so I'm reposting it here.]

Kevin Dooley

What are you actually doing?

I am grateful that Keith Hjortshoj has given his thoughts to this blog. Keith's book,Overcoming Writing Blocks,has been seminal to my understanding of writing blocks and very insightful for my students. Dr. Hjortshoj is the John S. Knight Director of Writing in the Majors at Cornell University. He has published in Asian and Islamic studies in addition to Composition and Rhetoric.

When I tell people that I teach writing as movement (or as “embodied movement”), I hope they won’t ask me what I mean, exactly. They rarely do. Perhaps that’s because the idea pleases them (they often smile when I say it) and rings true. We all want writing to feel more like dancing. Or perhaps the statement seems, in an oxymoronic way, vaguely obvious. When we write, after all, we are doing something, not just with our brains and our fingers but with our whole selves in space and time. And when people talk about this activity they use the language of movement. They say they got somewhere, that the project is moving along, or (if it isn’t) that they’re stuck, blocked, or running into trouble: not moving. They say that writing itself flows or is choppy, like moving water, or that it’s graceful or awkward. Writing can skitter across the page or plod along in dreary iambs, like a tired donkey. In fact it’s difficult to talk about real writing (as opposed to abstract plans for writing) without reference to motion.

If asked what I mean, I could just say that, honestly enough, and most people would be satisfied.

But I’m not, because the answers to the further questions they might have asked get very complicated, and I’m still in the process of figuring them out. What is moving, exactly?

In some ways it’s the writer; in other ways it’s the writing, the language itself. And although these kinds of movement, of people and of texts, are related, they aren’t the same. Through coordinated movement of the embodied mind (self), sentences and passages move along the page and resonate, for readers, with qualities of a living voice now detached from the writer (who is doing something else). But we can’t reduce either of these dimensions of writing to the other. And when writers and their writing run into trouble, these distinctions become important. Saying “Just do it!” rarely solves the problem.

An example will help to explain why.

A graduate student who met with me every week, while working on his dissertation, typically arrived with less than a page of handwritten draft that set off in an interesting direction but ended abruptly. When I asked Carl why he stopped, he said that he got “stuck,” uncertain or confused, and really felt he needed to do further reading before he could continue. But then his ideas changed, he started a new page, stopped again, reverted to reading and thinking . . .

On one level, the problem seems fairly simple. Becoming fainthearted, Carl made the common academic blunder of confusing actually writing with reading and thinking about writing—two very, different but also embodied activities that felt safer. So I could have explained that confusion each week and said, again,“Don’t stop writing!”

But these explanations didn’t help, and one day I asked Carl to tell me exactly what happened at the moment he stopped, because I noticed that his handwriting gradually deteriorated and trailed off. He said, “The pen falls out of my hand.” As his doubts about what he was saying accumulated, he explained, his hand became increasingly cramped until he couldn’t hold the pen, and this physical inability to continue told him he had to stop writing and read, both to rest his hand and to collect his thoughts: to restore the physical and mental composure necessary for composing. Just keep writing? He couldn’t. (Carl wrote with pen, I should mention, because typing was even more paralyzing.)

Dualistic thinking will now tempt us to conclude that what we thought was a psychological (cognitive or emotional) problem was really a physical one, such as “carpal tunnel syndrome.” Time for the writing teacher to recommend physical therapy?

Not if the therapy is confined to a wrist brace or a set of exercises. Carl’s hand was connected to the rest of him, including his mind. When his fingers tightened on the pen, this effort to coordinate language and thought—to fabricate the kind of writing he felt unworthy to produce—gripped his entire being. As his hand began to cramp, the fluency of his thought and his writing deteriorated as well. Which was the cause and which was the effect? It’s impossible to say, and pointless to try, because these dimensions of the self are inseparable.

But this doesn’t mean the problem is hopeless. With awareness that writing (like everything else we do) is psychophysical movement, we can address the problem from either direction, through release. “When I’m falling,” Willem de Kooning said, “I’m doing alright. . .I’m really slipping, most of the time, into that glimpse. I’m like a slipping glimpser.” Like painting and walking, writing is falling into empty space, with trust in a mysteriously familiar ability realized in motion. Like walking, writing always results, in the moment, from release, not from control. Preparing to take a step, getting your limbs in the right position, thinking about the right way to take this risk, is not walking. Release your mind, release your limbs, and you move. It doesn’t matter which way you release first.

What about that risk, and the need for preparation? For the purpose of writing, there’s nothing wrong with preparation—with reading, or with thinking about what you want to say. But preparing to write is not writing and doesn’t necessarily lead to writing, any more than preparing to walk will get you anywhere. And in the moment, there is no risk in writing. This is why William Stafford called writing “one of the great, free human activities.” While you are writing, no one else is actually reading, or judging, what you say, so you are free to say anything. It really is like dancing, at home alone, with the curtains drawn, when you can release your body, release your mind, and move. When you release, mindful of this freedom, you can just dance. When you release (not before) you can “Just write!”

How does writing itself move, beyond us? That’s another complicated puzzle and topic, perhaps, or another post.

What Totally Untrained Artists Might Have to Show Us About Writing Blocks

Henry Darger

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." --- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, 1999

The unschooled sometimes seem like the lucky ones. 

So-called "naive artists" like Henry Darger, Henri Rousseau, Howard Finster, and Grandma Moses, just to name a few in the visual arts category, have the chutzpah to create without degree granted, grant awarded, or sanction.

 

Their work seems the epitome of Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers. It is like one long and glorious private writing. It's creativity done for and by the self with Interested Parties looking on after the fact, uninvited.

People might flock to museum shows of naive art, dig out credit cards for expensive purchases, or write scholarly treatises on an unschooled artist, but that was never the artist's intention.

 

In terms of taking control of the proximity of audience (pushing the audience far away in one's head if it's a bothersome audience, bringing the audience closer if intimacy is needed), unschooled artists seem to be the real masters of taking charge. 

They've kicked out the teacher entirely by never entering the proximity of a classroom (whether because they're too young--are still a child; because they opted out of formal training; or because they lacked access to that training).

 

The unschooled frustrate the schooled. 

The unschooled seem to think they can create outside the immense framework of Art and Writing, the ones created by specialists. 

The unschooled do not drag around Tradition. Instead, they go straight to the source: to the unbridled joy of creating that many others only long to be able to experience again (since it withdrew from life with the end of childhood).

In Brenda Ueland's classic 1938 treatise, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit, children figure prominently as artists.

Ueland sets up a contrast between the unfettered abilities of children and the limited imagination of those who have experienced school instruction. As Rob Pope has suggested, twentieth-century research on creativity has attempted to discern whether creativity is an ordinary or unique capacity, and this research has often selected young children for its subject. 

Young children are deemed suitable test cases for creativity research because of children’s motivation to create, “more therapeutic rather than assessment-driven,” and because of children’s level of exposure to teachers’ criticism.

In one instance, Ueland agrees to pose for a portrait for three days for children who had no training. Ueland finds the children’s creative process and the results of their work to be “remarkable—all different, astonishing in their own way because the creative impulse was working innocently, not egotistically or to please someone, an instructor, say, who three in the anxious questions: is it art? has it balance? design?" 

The children operated out of intrinsic, non-school motivations: “If they had worked that hard for school it probably would have killed them. They were working for nothing but fun, for that glorious inner excitement. It was the creative power working in them." Ueland asks us to think about the children’s play we have witnessed, suggesting that creativity is really an ordinary rather than specialized event.

Hughes Mearns in his 1929 Creative Power cast the situation in a more startling light: "Blessed are the poor in English for they shall see with their own eyes." 

As a writing teacher, I certainly believe teaching can lead to great benefits and creativity. I do also think, however, that sometimes we need to step away from our training. For me what is most striking about the unschooled is the way in which their intrapersonal dialog is cleaner, like mountain air.

Unlike most people when creating, these individuals don't have artistic standards or the language of formal study floating around in their inner talk. Their work can be in much greater contact with the instinctual, and their motive and purpose are different than someone who is part of the system. 

The teacher also will not figure as an imaginary audience in the intrapersonal dialog of the unschooled. Perhaps Donald Bartholomae is a bit right in "Inventing the University": once we're schooled, we're always schooled, always in part writing for a teacher.

No matter the stack of degrees behind our name, sometimes we need to find a place where we can remain a perpetual beginner.

We can pick up the habits of the unschooled by practicing in a genre that we have had no formal training in. 

We can use materials (crayons, markers) associated with children to do a draft. We can fill the pages of our writing notebook, no matter the genre of our work, with drawings: with childlike renditions of our ideas, including drawings of academic thesis statements and scholarly book proposals.

I once met a law professor who mentioned to me at a meeting how he spent his weekends working on spy novels, one book-length manuscript after the next. (When someone learns of my profession, I usually get comments about how much people hate writing or that they're "bad" at grammar, so this was a relief.)

When he talked about his writing life, his body language was filled with joy. It was like watching a kid talking about playing with his new birthday toys. Not a trace of anxiety or worry. 

Here was someone deeply trained in one profession (law) but who found joy in a subject he'd never taken official classes in (creative writing). 

When I asked him if he ever intended to publish, he said that he had no intention of showing anyone the work. And I think that was the secret of his joy, the center of his training.

Keep Talking to Yourself

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.

Exits into the Now: The Value of Meta Writing



zoompf.com

 

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.

The Stone Backpack of Perfectionism

Many of us carry around a stone backpack when we write: we unwittingly lug around a heavy load of our own preconceptions about our writing ability. This backpack isn't filled with stones per se but is actually made entirely of mind-generated rock: zippers, pockets, and straps.

That is, we approach a new writing moment with pre-formed ideas as to how the writing will turn out and what the experience will be like because we--and not some external critic, editor, or teacher--have already graded our performance. We assume we know our own writing capabilities--that we can predict what will happen in the next moment.
 
We are loading down the moment.
 
Even if what we're doing is presumably private writing or even disposable writing, chances are good that our intrapersonal talk involves a constant pressure to improve, a restlessness with our writing. A deep-rooted dissatisfaction.
 
(Not all this predetermined thought, of course, is necessarily "negative": we might be carrying around what seem like highly positive, generous views of our ability. But I'll save for this a later post since the brunt of our predetermined thought, I'm wagering, tends toward the critical for most of us.)
 
What follows is an activity I use with my undergraduate and graduate students to call a temporary halt to that need to "improve" as a writer.
 
Get yourself a blank screen or sheet of paper.
 
What would it be like—what would happen in your thoughts right now—if what you are as a writer is already wonderful, already Buddha?  If your writing was “perfect as it is” now? 
 
Jot down anything which arises in your mind in response to this notion of already-perfect. (Keep returning to the questions and keep seeing what arises in terms of:

* What sorts of images pass over your mind? Breathe into these images.  Follow them.  What do you notice?

* What sorts of emotion are you feeling?

* What color is one of those emotions?

* Breathe into this emotion.  Follow it. What do you notice?

See if you can gain a sense--even for a few seconds--of what it would feel like to stop wanting to change who you are as a writer. See if you feel the load lighten. See what it might be like to have a more expansive sense of the Present moment of writing. And when you return to the need-to-be-better thinking, notice yourself slipping back on the straps of the stone backpack.

20 Versions: One Way to Train in Impermanence

 

Picture of Don Murray

Legendary writing professor Don Murray once proposed that we think of 1,000 rewrites for a piece of our writing.  Instead of 1,000, come up with 20 versions of a text you’re writing, thinking of changes in style, content, and even genre. * SD indicates a revision that keeps the piece the same type of document or genre.

 

Here's how it looked when I tried out this exercise:

 

Original document:

1. Scholarly article on history of figurative language and creative writing

 

Its Transformations:

 

1.  article for trade journal (professional writers) on same topic

2. an interview (of contemporary creative writers) on topic for a trade journal
3. incorporate an interview section (of creative writers) in the scholarly article SD
4. humorous piece on how academia limits creativity of faculty
5. poem that has the simile as its topic (figurative language)
6. a talk at a conference for creative writers
7. a talk at a conference for historians of rhetoric
8. add a personal or autobiographical section  SD
9. blog posting (for educators or for poets)
10. statement on professional web page
11. incorporate into a teaching philosophy statement document
12. incorporate actual 19^th century student creative writings as examples SD
13. incorporate lectures on figuration from 19^th century Harvard professors SD
14. turn into full-length scholarly book
15. turn into a cartoon or illustration for something
16. turn into a PowerPoint for faculty
17. article about poetic license as it occurs today
18. same article as #17 for Humanities faculty only
19. personal essay that starts with a simile and metaphor about this topic in my writing and teaching life
20. a freewrite on same topic

This method promotes impermanence by keeping the genre of one's writing open. You don't have rigid preconceptions about genre, for one thing. In turn, by allowing the genre to even stay in-flux, you are making good use of the absence of audience during the writing moment (because genre is connected to particular audience expectations). You're taking control of the audience-in-the-head. For me, this method resulted in a poem (included at end of my second book, Lid to the Shadow, as well as a scholarly article in College Composition and Communication.)

 

Day Five of Institute on Overcoming Writing Blocks




Day Five of Institute

Curriculum covered today:
Revision as Invention
Giving Feedback Mindfully
Receiving Feedback Mindfully
Loving-Kindness Meditation
Keith Hjortshoj, Understanding Writing Blocks


Exercises:
Freewrite on Giving Feedback with Mindfulness
Freewrite on Receiving Feedback with Mindfulness
Student Praxis Presentations
Loving-Kindness Meditation for Writers (See June post)