today I don't want to be turned on

AKA so you want to take a writing class?

Apr 02, 2024

For someone who sends out this newsletter so sporadically it might surprise you how full of words my life is. I write every day. Mostly in the form of morning pages, but also the short story I’ve been playing around with for a while. I read every day too – my house a shrine to numerous piles of books, always in arms reach and ready to satiate all manner of reading whim. The bookmarked articles? Don’t get me started. I work on word collages at few times a week. This mostly means I stare at my cutting mat and soak up the words, then jig and splice and conjoin miniscule pieces of paper until a very particular sentence is born. The pieces are so tiny that they’re constantly turning up in various parts of the house; I happen upon miniscule bits of poetry all day long. Recent examples include the bathroom holding the phrase ‘I learned to trust the process’, or ’I’m trying to be brave’ found underfoot on the stairs. The most ridiculous thing is that I often dream prose too - sometimes the odd line, once in a blue moon a whole poem. The romance of that is something that never fails to charm my conscious self even though it’s honestly much less romantic than the actual work of writing.

For the past month my world has been full of even more words than usual. During March I took the Words Workshop with Rachel Larsen Weaver because a) I adore her and b) I was looking for something. A way to give voice to a part of myself that hadn’t shown up in my writing yet? Something in that ball park. But one of the most interesting things I’m taking away has really been paying attention to how and where my resistance shows up, and how the fuck to deal with it.

It went like this - Rachel would email every morning with a prompt and we would write and then share if we wanted to. Simple right! In class twice a week she would guide us through ideas, and there would be extra exercises - eg one week she prompted us to think about inventing a new word. I watched the class and sat in silence for what felt like 20 minutes. It actually felt like the most effective kind of meditation I’ve ever done – tell me to invent something and poof! Mind blank, no thoughts, no brainwaves. If I was hooked up to one of those brain monitors I swear it would be a flatline. BEEEEEEEEEP. All I could do was sit back and try to enjoy the peace and quiet.

After the tumbleweed and mild confusion of having literally no thoughts, then came the annoyance at the thing I couldn’t do. What I’ve discovered happens when I’m stuck on something, is that it wriggles in to my brain and makes a nice snug home there. I can’t just dismiss something out of hand. Trust me, I tried! I would love to have some of that shit! Instead, these things lodge themselves real good and I know that I must find a way to massage it out if I ever want to know peace again. I become equal parts fucked off and enthralled with the puzzle of it.

SPIRVOLTA – meaning; the breath that occurs before change.

Working through the resistance, putting scaffolding in place to do that, has been an essential part of this creative process for me. A big part of my writing routine has been to make moving my body a core part of the process. Basically, I prescribed myself a walk.

It usually looked like this: I would wake and sort out the things that need sorting. Morning tea, packed lunches, school runs, one good house deed (usually washing, YAWN). Then I got to the real work of the day. Write my morning pages. Read the email from Rachel. Start a new page of free form notes for the prompt, just brain dumping and stream of consciousness stuff. Then I put it all to one side and went for a walk. Sometimes I would swim. That movement was time to let the thoughts and ideas rub up against each other in my brain as my body performed it’s own meditation. Left leg, right leg, breast stroke and around. For those prompts and ideas I found almost repulsive (lol, I’m a drama queen but really tho wtf!) or times I just felt stuck, or even when I just wanted to ruminate on a good thing, that bodily movement was invaluable.

I’m nowhere near to being the first human to discover the tangible benefits of moving myself in order to move ideas through me. Thoreau, Nietzsche and Kant loved it. This New Yorker piece sums up everything you need to know about the research:

Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Earlier this year, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published what is likely the first set of studies that directly measure the way walking changes creativity in the moment. They got the idea for the studies while on a walk. “My doctoral advisor had the habit of going for walks with his students to brainstorm,” Oppezzo says of Schwartz. “One day we got kind of meta.”

Back in the workshop, there was a prompt in the second week about what turns us on. How can I put this? I really did not want to fucking write about what turns me on. I was irrationally angry! To the point I had no option but to actually laugh at my own resistance! The inner monologue went something like this - how much of my life have I dedicated to paying attention, noticing the good, tapping in to my pleasure centers? I’d wage 90%. Can’t a girl get a day off? I could write that kind of thing in my sleep! And yet? I DID NOT WANT TO. I WAS ACTIVELY APPALLED AT THE IDEA. (side note: I hope it’s obvious but in case not - none of my resistance was to the actual prompts, but to something in myself. Rachel’s words workshop was thought provoking and glorious and you should try and get her to run it again for you. This was just a classic case of ‘my shit’ creeping in, trying to get in the way of a good time. Weirdly, that is the kind of self understanding that does in fact turn me on. LOL forever.)

Like the good little artist I can sometimes be, I worked the process. I wrote my pages. I made my notes. I walked around the park and bitched whilst laughing to myself about having to write whatever I would end up writing. (Being a moany old cow is a fun persona to wear sometimes!) I came home and got on with other things. I walked to the swimming pool and threw myself in. I emerged from the water cleansed, tired and excitedly holding a new angle from which to smash this puzzle together.

For me, so much of creating something is just finding the way in. Moving my body physically has helped immensely with that. It’s so literal it’s almost comic – I just, move myself? To see it from another side? Oh. Ok then!

Writing everyday for three weeks taught me things. I discovered I could write, joyously and wholeheartedly, for five hours straight. I found pockets of resistance and worked out ways through them. I remembered that accountability is my friend. I wrote things I sometimes quite liked and never hated. I doubled down on my love of hatching sentences and playing with form. I learnt I want to do more of the work of stringing sentences together meaningfully and giving them containers to live on in.