Thursday, April 25, 2019

My Editor, the Monkey on My Back (4.25.19)

For those of you who feel a need to return to the basics every so often, maybe as a way to recharge your writerly batteries, we decided at yesterday's W@1 session to concentrate next week on “free writing,” a method also known as “automatic writing.”  For our purposes in poetry writing, free writing is second cousin to stream of consciousness writing and even the techniques of the surreal practiced by the likes of Rimbaud, Artaud, Breton, Joyce, and on to Ginsberg, Kerouac, O’Hara, Ferlinghetti, and further into our generation as practiced by Wanda Coleman, Ann Lauterbach, Leslie Scalapino and many other writers of the San Francisco/Black Sparrow Press scene.[1]

Basically, free writing is this: you write without stopping.

You do this at a steady but not frenetic clip, for a set period of maybe ten minutes, then fifteen, then twenty as you become more accustomed to it.  You do this a couple times each week, even more often if you’re up for it, just as you might work out with hand weights two or three times a week: three sets of twenty reps on this side, three sets of twenty reps on the other side, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

You write without having anything in particular to say.[2]

The point of free writing is to loosen up your writerly synapses, to get you physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually situated toward writing something of value at some point.  BUT NOT YET.[3]

Peter Elbow, a popular teacher of writing in the 1970s, had this to say about free writing: 

The main thing about freewriting is that it is nonediting.  It is an exercise in bringing together the process of producing words and putting them down on the page.  Practiced regularly, it undoes the ingrained habit of editing at the same time you are trying to produce.[4]

Decouple production from editing!  This is what I was trained to do with my own students, finally, in the 1980s, after I’d finished graduate school and worked at a more progressive Department of English. (I might add that this training also helped save me as a writer of poetry—it helped me to get the Monkey Editor off my back so I could at least get some words on the page.)  But it’s easier said than done, so there are techniques to learn, of course!

Technique: make the time to free write regularly, at least a couple of days a week, and for about ten minutes.  You can expand—more often, for longer periods—as you get better at the decoupling.

Technique: don’t try to speed write, but write steadily.  It’s the continuousness that helps to loosen up your writerly synapses and, quite literally, the muscles in your pen-holding fingers.

Technique: don’t stop.  FOR NOTHIN’!!  For the entire ten minute writing period, just keep moving the pencil or pen (or your thumbs on your iPhone’s keypad).  Don’t even worry about hitting returns.  Don’t worry about correcting anything like punctuation or spelling or word order.  Don’t stop to think of a better word than the one you just used (although, if that word occurs to you as you free write, put it down!), and don’t revise.  If you get stuck for something to put down, just write the word STUCK or I’M STUCK or something like this until your mind gets over itself.

Free writing isn’t always or just about generating new content.  Some of us have little trouble doing that naturally already.  Free writing can help you to establish a fresher, more creative stance toward the content you already have in mind.  If it’s done in a directed fashion, it can even help you discover new thoughts, relationships, associations, perspectives, memories and the like with respect to your content.  It can help you to richer content.

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And now for the project . . . use your free writing first to loosen yourself up, then perhaps to develop content for a poem.  Don’t set out trying to write a poem, though; in fact, don’t even try to make lines.  Remember the lineation project we just did?  Well, try writing in an un-lineated fashion, margin to margin.  After ten minutes or so, set what you wrote aside.  Come back to it later looking for potential poems—in the form of a topic, a certain tone or persona, a rhythmical effect, some striking images; all the stuff you’d expect to put into a poem.  Then look for or recreate out of your free writing the “movement” of a poem, which is to say, content that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, so that you don’t wind up with just a fragment or fragments.

And that’s what you should bring to our next Wednesdays@One, along with your thoughts about your experience with free writing.

See you then!


[1] I am not merely dropping names here.  If you’re really interested to improve your writing, then you’ll want to extend your commitment to reading these and other poets of the Surrealist, Automatic, Beat and post-Beat eras.  You’ll want to understand why they abandoned traditional approaches to composition, not to mention conventional understandings of what constitutes poems and poetry.
[2] A relative of free writing, which I used to teach in my freshman comp classes, is “directed free writing,” in which you write non-stop with a certain topic or idea in mind, like “cars” or “money” or “salt” or “laundry detergent,” and the more generalized (to a point), the better.  This kind of writing is also called invention writing or discovery writing—you practice it without using a reference manual of any kind, in order to understand how much you already know about a subject, and therefore how much you already have to say, even before you begin to research it.
[3] An analogy: the other day, I overheard a conversation among tennis players on the court next to mine.  One fellow asked why people stand in close to the net and bat the ball back and forth to each other as a warm-up.  “What’s the point of that,” he asked his tennis mates, “what’s that supposed to do for you?”  This was a man who likely could never sit still long enough to free write.  (I wanted to shout, “The point is hand-eye-ball coordination, you dummy!  You’re going to need these when the points count.”  But I didn’t.)
[4] “Freewriting,” in Invention and Design: A Rhetorical Reader, eds. Forrest D. Burt and E. Cleve Want. New York: Random House, 1975.

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