Day Two of Institute on Overcoming Writing Blocks



AlicePopkorn

Day Two of Institute

Curriculum covered today:
Freewriting as Mindfulness Practice
Intrapersonal Dialog
Groundlessness and Writing
Disposable Writing
Shunryu Suzuki, "Control"
Peter Elbow, Writing With Power
Mike Rose, "Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans"
Carl Rogers, "Communication: Its Blocking & Its Facilitation"

Activity:
Today we were fortunate to be visited by three members of the House Sangha of Salem and Marblehead. They guided us through seated and walking meditation and discussed their mindfulness practices. Quite a sight: a line of barefoot people watching their breathing as they moved slowly down a long academic hallway!

Exercises:

Build-a-Poem
Freewrite: Your Writing is Already Buddha, Already Perfect
Disposable Writing

* I'll be posting after each day of the 5-Day Institute on mindful writing. Stay tuned for Day Three.

Day One of Institute on Overcoming Writing Blockis



AlicePopkorn
 

Day One of Institute
Curriculum covered today:

Audience as proximity
Awareness of impact of audience on our writing
The fundamental privacy of writing
Materials and Audience Relation
Peter Elbow, Writing With Power
Keith Hjortshoj, Understanding Writing Blocks


Exercises:

Caricature of a Tricky Audience
Seated Meditation
Freewrite about the Sensory Experience of Writing
Mindful Eating and Description
Images of Writing Blocks
Writing Mantra

* I'll be posting after each day of the 5-Day Institute on mindful writing. Stay tuned for Day Two.

Conceptual Metaphors and Images (For Writing Blocks) Contributed by Other Writers

Here are some conceptual metaphors & images for writing blocks I've received from other writers. Send yours along by commenting to this post. Indicate whether you want your name displayed or whether you prefer to stay anonymous.

My metaphor for writer's block is using a GPS where it keeps searching for the satellites, but it can't figure out where you are. It just keeps searching and searching, and eventually you either give up on it, or you find your way, but while it is searching, it is a feeling of hopelessness and frustration just like writer's block for me. My metaphor for writing when it "works" is trotting on a horse. I lose track of time and feel totally focused on the up and down and the sounds and smells and totally absorbed in the moment. Writing when it flows is totally like that for me. --Shirley P. 

 

Writer's block feels like I'm clawing my eyes out with jagged fingernails. --J.L. Powers (www.jlpowers.net)

Being at the bottom of a monolith with endless stairs.
                                --Audrey, graduate student in Overcoming Writing Blocks course

I was sixteen. It was snowing heavily, over a foot on the ground. I had left the admissions office of Amherst College, where I’d had a bland interview. I was to meet my father at the town library. He had told me directions, but I took a wrong turn and, as Springsteen says, “I just kept going.”

The snow kept falling, off and on, and the wind blew through the gaps in my overcoat and my buttoned wool suit. Finally, I knew I had gone wrong, so I turned, and turned again, and I found myself on a long stretch with few houses. Ahead of me was the University of Massachusetts football stadium. A flicker of memory: a warm autumn day, the bright colors of the field and the uniforms, the concrete bleachers like giant steps, each row coming above my waist. Before a childhood in Illinois and adolescence in Western Connecticut, I had spent my first five years of my life in this college town as my father finished graduate school.

It got colder. My thin socks were soaked with melted snow that found its way into my dress shoes. I turned again, some side street lined with small houses and bare trees. Off to my left I could see where I thought I wanted to go; something told me it was the way back downtown, where the library had to be, where at least there would be stores at which I could ask directions.

It had been over an hour. The library was only five minutes from the Admissions Office. Where was I?

Ahead of me, I couldn’t see a way to turn left, so I left the street and set off down a driveway, then walked through a snowy backyard and leapt over a half-frozen brook.

As truly as I remember, the moment I stepped over the brook it hit me—my own past. I was in a small lawn in the back of a student housing complex—Lincoln Apartments—where I had lived those first years of my life. I had flashes of playing ball on this lawn when there was grass, not snow. I followed a map in my mind around one building and there it was: my earliest home! That back wall, where I’d bounced a ball and learned to catch; the second floor railing from which my father dropped a coconut. It split at the foot of our apartment’s porch, white chunks in the sun. And there, from the porch, I saw the parking lot where I had learned to ride a bike.

I didn’t knock at my old door. I had come far enough.

It took another 45 minutes to find the library and my worried father. I told him my story, where I’d been, what I’d found. I couldn’t explain the mystery of it--why I’d chosen that backyard at that time—and I couldn’t make clear the wonder of it, the way that step across the brook brought a lost world back to me. It couldn’t mean to him what it meant to me: wandering in the snow, dressed in, of all things, a suit, lost, uncomfortable, and then, leaving the road and cutting through someone’s backyard and stepping into something at the core of me.  --J.D. Scrimgeour

 

I think of writing as a thoughtful expression of various ideas, questions and themes joined together in one carefully engineered structure, in which all the parts do not necessarily compliment one another, but all assist in the work 'becoming' through a combination of their supportive, compressive and passive properties. Supportive parts represent reason, which gives the structure strength and integrity. Compressive parts are the questions I am asking or trying to answer; they are what I deeply examine or wrestle with. Passive parts are grammatical and syntactical elements that provide clarity.

For me this process is like constructing a skyscraper. I am the uncertain and self-conscious engineer, guided by a loose blue print of creative compulsion. Using ideas as the materials and emotion as the fuel, I build, and many times disassemble, until I’ve reached a summit, where, in full view, I feel accepting, if not satisfied, with the overall structure.

--Carolyn Strain, graduate student at Salem State University

Swimmer in a Bath Tub: The Image I Had for My Own Writing Block

For several years after I finished my first graduate creative writing degree--right into my early thirties--I struggled through a prolonged writing block. It would occasionally dissipate for a few months but then return. I spent many lonely and joyless hours at the desk trying to finish pieces to no avail.

Back then, the image I had of not being able to write was of a swimmer in a bath tub. Specifically, I visualized myself turning a corner in a large and empty apartment with wood floors. (I once had a chic poetry teacher, equally visiting-assistant-professor-transient, who rented an enormous apartment--rents were cheap--but kept only one item, a typewriter on a table, in most rooms.)

I'd turn the corner to see the bathroom, its door half-open, to find a swimmer in a claw-foot bathtub. His (it was a male) muscular arm was frozen in the air above the tub in the position of a forward crawl, his head tilted outside the bathwater as though to breathe.

For some reason, I was holding an enormous piece of paisley like a feather duster because my intention apparently was to clean the bathroom. I could tell he was a serious swimmer, a real athlete, but somehow stuck in the bathtub.

Sometimes the water itself was frozen and set in stacks, each labeled with a tiny "h" or "c" for Hot and Cold, or rimmed in red or blue.

(Less frequently, I was the one sitting in a claw-foot bathtub, a giant taking a bath in the middle of the day. In the bath water were tug boats and parts of the city I was living near at the time--so, New Orleans at one point. A kimono with an attacking bird of prey on back was always hung on the bathroom door. I'd watch ducks and boats paddle around me.)

What I came to understand is that water is associated with the unconscious and that I was unable to function as a writer because I was afraid of what I would find in myself. In real life, I don't know how to swim very well--a fear of holding my breath and being under "water." I am afraid of being "submerged."

I had been trained--was a serious athlete--through my education but was unable to move because I was in the wrong context: a bathtub, not a swimming pool, poetry, not the openness of any-writing-that-arises. (Maybe I felt a bit like I could be like the Olympian mentioned below.)

He couldn't swim not only because he was confined to a bathtub (where the substance, water, does resemble what he would have found in his normal context of a pool, just too small an amount) but because the water itself was frozen, stacked, organized by "temperature." The passions were separated into two binaries, overly simplistic and neat.

The bathtub was claw-foot--not contemporary--not because I had a penchant for renting apartments in Victorians but because it's aggressive, slightly personified, capable of moving and taking my swimmer with it.

What did I eventually take away from this image of my writing block? The need to give myself more of the unconscious to move around in (so let myself write prose as well as poetry). The recognition that all sorts of feelings will be mixed up in that water. Patience with the fact that I was afraid and a resolve to proceed. The basic "physical" action of just moving, without judging the result. Treat all writing as freewriting, private writing, low-stakes writing until I feel joy in the work. Then decide whether I want to up the anty, show to others, send out for feedback or publication.

Just as words carry around conceptual metaphors (see June 2013 post), each of us carries around certain associations with writing difficulty.

When you contemplate the writing blocks or writing-related anxiety you have experienced, what image comes to mind? Freewrite. Describe it in detail; use your senses; provide a setting, if possible. Then unpack it: look at what you've written. Watching your breathing, see what arises. What could this image mean for you? See if you can write a piece--poetry, prose, just a paragraph--from your image. (Here's the poem--below--I wrote from my own image of block.)

From Control Bird Alt Delete (2013 Iowa Poetry Prize, forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press, 2014):

A Lake in the Hand

 

Swimming through the indents,

and across the herringbone lake
the plane of handwriting and flourishes,
the lines of the palm, a flock of tabs
in the houndstooth sky above the lake,
I bump into a fancy signature
swimming in his lace collar and tweed coat
 
through the joys and concerns,
around the Rose and Thorn,
the jumps in time, gaps in knowledge
in the channels of the palm, before the school of tabs
hits the pilings, the concrete side of the dam
that is thinking about daytime television drama.
Let me say he is in a belletristic font
that he is making tremendous splashes while doing a forward crawl
and that some of the splashes look like words,
 
so that along with blue-rimmed pieces of water,
and red-rimmed pieces of water, a Pardon
me scoots forward, each wave a different color
in its wake
and I see that he is toweling off on the other shore.
A quill-like figure on a landscape of graphic design elements,
a city-state where the primary crop is cyclones
and pyramids.  Whereas two score years ago,  I saw
a swimmer in a claw-foot bath tub
as I was cleaning the house with my paisley.
His arm was raised like a branch
fallen on a river, the water stacked in the tub,
little “h”s on some pieces, blue rims on others,
holes to hook fingers in and transport others.
I knew he was an Olympian
swimming at the Y, a great M in a sentence
of blue and yellow tiles

and in this document of a new freedom
a Greek key pattern fills the lake,
w/ houses that are monuments along the shore,
a flock of typed X’s clatters in,
this last line with me on it like a ball
this last line zigzags
and fills the barn,
houndstooth spills into
the barn, where a small red duck paddles
innocently, in circles.

Conceptual Metaphors for the Writing Experience



waldzen

What sorts of metaphors or imagery about writing are you carrying around in your head?

As I've said on previous posts, it's important to consult your intrapersonal or inner dialog in order to write with ease, trust, and fluency. (See the post, "How to Make Contact with Your Inner Dialog" from September 2012, for instance.)

Part of noticing that intrapersonal conversation involves finding out how we talk to ourselves about our writing. So we turn to the intrapersonal to find content but also to find our opinions about the writing process, audience, and our writing ability. Chances are very good that those intrapersonal opinions are having a great deal of influence on a person's writing experience--and ability. It's important then to be mindful of those views we're carrying around because they have a tendency to operate unseen and unheard.

One of the best ways to become mindful of these internal commentaries is to conduct a search for any conceptual metaphors or images pertaining to writing.

Conceptual metaphors organize our everyday functioning: they organize our perceptions and actions. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By put it: conceptual metaphors (also called cognitive metaphors) are "pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action,"

More than just a metaphor in a single sentence or line of poetry, conceptual metaphors are large conglomerates of thought. As Philip Eubanks describes them, they are "metaphor expressions [that] recruit larger metaphoric concepts." An easy example is the conceptual metaphor in English that "Time is Money." Behind this three-word metaphoric phrase is an influential belief of common assumption; it has the potential to change what you do in the next hour or how you go about the rest of your adult life.

Or your adult writing life.

Let's turn to a few common words for different aspects or moments in the writing process.

While each of these is not a metaphoric phrase per se, they each contain an image or association, in part because of their connotative language:

Draft
Brainstorming
Freewriting
Prewrite
Outline
Rewrite
Revision
Feedback
Proofreading

We regularly use these terms to talk about writing, yet each of them carries around usually unrecognized assumptions and views about what it means to write.

Draft: breezy, temporary, fleeting, insubstantial, invisible (notice only its effects). As one of my graduate students also said--draft, as in pulling a draft beer (a volume, abundance, a small sample from a much larger supply).

So those could be connotations of "draft," but what might be the effect of those connotations?

(One way to figure this out is to come up with alternatives or synonyms for a word. A synonym for "draft" would be "stage." How is "stage" different in what it suggests than "draft"? By finding alternatives, you can better notice the original language.)

Well, for one, if we carry around the idea of an early stage of a composition as fleeting, this could correspond nicely with the sense of impermanence, if we are of the Buddhist mindset. That breeziness or invisibility, however, could make early writing seem hard to catch--and increase the difficulty of starting out on a piece. Then again, if draft is like pulling from a keg, this suggests a big inner supply.

Each of the words on that list (and many others) can be explored. Please tell us what you think. What are the connotations of those ordinary words about writing? What sorts of imagery do they contain for you? After you find an image or connotation for one of the words, ask yourself, "What could be the impact on my writing experience of that image or connotation?" Send along your comments below.

Loving-Kindness Meditation for Writers

Mr. Littlehand

This meditation is an adaptation of metta or loving-kindness meditation. It's a variation of the loving-kindness meditation for non-writers described by Sharon Salzberg: a fundamentally imaginative practice leading to empathy and compassion for ourselves and others.

In my Overcoming Writing Blocks courses, this writerly loving-kindness meditation is one of my favorite activities, right beside showing students mindful eating and walking.

Writer's Loving-Kindness can be helpful in our interactions with audience. Recall from previous posts that we've discussed how all writing is at least initially private writing and how we've stressed the importance of recognizing our fundamental solitude while writing. The audience, to paraphrase Walter Ong, is fictional; what's real is the Present moment. (See earlier posts "The 3 Paradoxes of Mindful Writing" and "How-To Tip #1: Kicking Out the Reader-in-the-Head.")

What better way to take advantage of the vacancy of the writer's Present moment, what better way to make use of our imaginative inclination, than to use those capacities to develop a more reflective, more nuanced relationship to potentially tricky audiences or what Peter Elbow calls dangerous audiences? (Note, though, that Writer's Loving-Kindness meditation is also intended for more benign audience relationships.)

Here are the steps:

Sit in a meditation posture on the floor or in a chair. Begin watching your breathing. Breathing in, think to yourself, "Here." Breathing out, think to yourself, "Now." Do this for several minutes.

1. Think of someone who has been supportive of your writing either in the past or in your current work. On the In Breath, visualize something which would bring this supportive individual tremendous happiness. Try to think of something relating to this individual's writing, reading, or maybe even teaching life. On the Out Breath, visualize this individual receiving or this item (or experiencing this happy event, if it's an event like a literary prize). Continue for several minutes to think of this person in this fashion while watching your breathing.

2. Turn to yourself. What would make you happy in terms of your writing life? On the In Breath, visualize this item or event. On the Out Breath, visualize yourself receiving this item or experiencing this event. Continue for several minutes to think of yourself in this fashion while watching your breathing.

3. Turn to a neutral--someone who is not central to your writing life but plays a role. You might not even know this person's name. For instance, in the past, I've visualized an editor at one of the literary journals to which I submit my work. (I've never met him.) Follow the same steps as above for the In and Out Breath, focusing this time on this person.

4. Turn to a dangerous audience--someone from your past or current writing experience who has tripped up your writing, wittingly or unwittingly. Follow the steps for this person.

5. Turn to any writing group or class you are involved in. For instance, when I'm using this meditation in my Overcoming Writing Blocks class, we contemplate the whole class (students and teacher alike). You could also pick the members of a coffee shop writing group you belong to or the crowd who attends a neighborhood reading series, for instance. Follow the steps for this group.

6. Lastly, turn to the writers of your genre--all the people who compose the type of writing you do (poetry, short fiction, etc.). Follow the steps for this group. Wish them well.

From doing the Writer's Loving-Kindness Meditation, you might notice a softening of your outlook toward difficult judges of your work. You might also gain a sense of their perspective--the reason why they might have acted toward your work as they did. Most of all, this meditation provides a different sensation of audience. Instead of fighting with audiences in our head or even kicking them out in order to use our actual solitude, we can greet that audience and those fellow writers with calm and generosity.

The Movie Screen of the Mind

Rosa Menkman

Everything is mind-made.

--Ayya Khema

 
Each of us has an entire movie production going on inside our heads, the volume turned down so that no one hears the script. Think of the present moment as what’s being shown on that screen, including the screen.
 
When I was in my early thirties, I was suffering from an extended period of not being able to write--as well (not coincidentally) as from a period of personal sorrow.
 
One summer morning, I realized that I was the one making my own moods and feelings. Lying in tangled sheets, I saw my mind as a big empty movie screen, the sort you’d find at a drive-in theater, a white rectangle, upon which images and sounds were projected. The surprise, however, was that I was the projector. I suddenly understood that no one else was responsible for how I was feeling at any moment and that I was the speaker of the dialog in my own head. The people from my life who were in my thoughts were not actually in the room (just as the audience for most writing is also not in the room). I was the script writer and actor, making up the dialog and performing the parts of myself and of the other characters. 

For a split second, that movie screen of the mind stayed white and empty, and I had an experience of what Buddhist practitioners such as Pema Chodron call our innate joy. Behind everything—behind all the negative, excited, fluctuating thoughts and feelings of each moment of our lives, there is a screen of joy. 
 
Mindful writing means being aware of the movie as well as the screen it's being displayed on. It's as Bhante Gunaratana describes in Mindfulness in Plain English: “There is a difference between being aware of a thought and thinking a thought.That difference is very subtle. It is primarily a matter of feeling or texture. A thought you are simply aware of with bare attention feels light in texture; there is a sense of distance between that thought and the awareness viewing it.  It arises lightly like a bubble, and it passes away without necessarily giving rise to the next thought in that chain. Normal conscious thought is much heavier in texture. It is ponderous, commanding, and compulsive. It sucks you in and grabs control of consciousness. By its very nature it is obsessional, and it leads straight to the next thought in the chain, with apparently no gap between them.” 

Being a mindful person, however, is fundamentally different than being a mindful writer.

In practicing everyday mindfulness, a person tries to perceive the thoughts as they arise--negative, positive, or any gradation in between--and not follow them around the corner like a puppy dog, not be reactive. Sure, a mindful person has negative or provocative thoughts: they don't just react as often to that procession of ideas or images, and they consistently return to that large blank joyous screen.

A mindful writer also stays aware of arising thoughts--but with the intention of following one into an absorbed state of writing in which the conditions of the present moment are largely forgotten and words can appear on the page.

That is, a writer uses mindfulness as a gateway into what is largely an unmindful existence.

This experience of writing a lot, of being oblivious to the passage of time, of being inspired, is temporary, a phase we inevitable exit.

The mindful writer, though, upon exiting writing returns to mindfulness, to breathing, the constant joy of the present moment, a joy that involves change. (Part of that change is the change in one's writing ability: it has tapered off, mutated, fizzled, dead-ended--for the time being.)

The mindful writer celebrates the blank white screen along with the frequent oblivion of producing words. While other writers are afraid of those gaps--dreading the blank moment and using gimmicks to keep writing ability close--trying to avoid the present moment in order to prolong oblivion--the mindful writer welcomes the blank screen without reservation, without fear, without judgement. (A great discussion of accepting temporary inability to write is Donald Murray's "The Essential Delay.") The mindful writer is never afraid of those gaps, and if afraid, studies that fear itself as though it were an award-winning movie.