Tag Archives: Process

Information Overload

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in art, Attention, creating, emotional safety, natural world, Observation, Process, Reading, ritual, safety, slowing down, Writing Advice

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Every day each human being on earth processes or filters immeasurable amounts of information. Some of this information comes from the media: our televisions, newspapers, radios, internet, podcasts, etc. etc. etc. Some comes from books. And some comes from the natural world. What do you pay attention to? What do you ignore? And what do you count as information?

I count all media as a form of information. I think there is a difference between information and knowledge, and I think there is also a difference between knowledge and wisdom.

I include under the category of media all TV shows and advertising. In fact these might be the most insidious forms of information because we absorb them and as we absorb they inform us of how life is supposed to be lived. As a child I didn’t question these things. Life was white and middle-class. Mothers enjoyed housework. Fathers enjoyed coming home to find dinner on the table. Children went to their parents for advice. There was no problem that could not be solved in thirty minutes. We all worshiped the same god. I absorbed all this from TV and advertising, because it was all that I saw. The world of television seemed more real than my own world, but I found something different in the woods behind our house.

This was where I went to escape and to be alone and to read and build forts. As a child I didn’t understand how fortunate I was to have a safe natural area right in my backyard. I didn’t know that many people did not have such a refuge.

In the woods I absorbed different sorts of information. I absorbed smells and observed crayfish and bugs and frogs. I invented games and people and made up stories which I acted out. I met my writer self down in the woods. I met my intuition. I learned to listen to a quieter sort of information than what the media delivered. Or what I heard in school. In the woods things made more sense than in the world of television or people. I’m grateful that I had access to that safe space, grateful for the filter the natural world gave me to sort through the offerings of the human world. The human world was chaotic to me.

That information gained in the woods is still there. That intuition. That ability to find patterns. I’ve lived my life ignoring a great deal of the information that comes from the sources that scream at me the loudest. I believe it is the path of a writer to listen and to sort and to not be led like a sheep by the many voices. I believe it is the path of a writer to be careful regarding the intake. Taking care with intake is the first step to taking care of what we can offer. Offer your best. Best in, best out. It’s as simple as that.

Proof of Seriousness?

11 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by in Attention, creating, Nancy Peacock, Observation, Process, Working, Writing Workshops

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

For years I wrote while holding down some sort of job that had nothing to do with writing. The jobs were not glamorous. House cleaning, bartending, carpentry, costumer, clerk in a grocery store, cocktail waitress. Have I mentioned house cleaning? I held that job off and on for fifteen years.

While working these jobs, I occasionally carved out time and finances to attend a writer’s conference. I always got something out of the conferences. I always picked up some new clue to the craft of writing, or some new way of looking at what I did. I made friends and enjoyed being around other writers. But attending conferences can be an expensive proposition. It takes time away from earning an income, and it takes money to attend. I wasn’t able to do it often.

Recently I was alarmed when I heard some advice being dispensed to young writers to attend lots of conferences and list these when submitting a piece for publication. The purpose of this was to prove to an agent or publisher that one is serious about writing.

Attending conferences is a wonderful thing to do, but frankly it proves nothing except that you have somehow found the time and resources to attend a conference. To gauge a list of conferences as proof of seriousness about writing is simply to value writers with money over writers without money. I’m not sure agents or a publishers actually use that gauge. Somehow I doubt it. I imagine agents and publishers gauge a writer’s proof of seriousness by their writing, and their willingness to work.

But perhaps I’m wrong.

Agents and publishers are bombarded every day with manuscripts from writers of every ilk. There are some who could be searching for a simple way to winnow the pile. Perhaps there are one or two (or more) who find a list of conferences attached to a manuscript as reason to read on, and a manuscript lacking such a list as a reason to not read on.

If so, this is a sad thing for literature. Work done outside of the publishing world and the academic world can only enrich a piece of writing.

Listing one’s crappy jobs (in my own list I left out milker on a dairy farm, assistant drum maker, and telephone surveyer) is probably no way to endear yourself to a publisher or agent. Yet, I value my crappy jobs as experiences that have helped me a great deal with my writing, with getting a scene right, or stepping into the mind and body of a character. I know what it is to stand on my feet eight hours a day. I know how small-minded some bosses can be. I know what it’s like to get kicked by a cow and smacked with its shit-encrusted tail. I can write about these things. The back aches, the frustrations, the quickness developed when that mean cow is in your stall. These things are not trivial. They’re important to fiction.

And they’re important to the world too. I stand by my belief that people who do blue-collar work are no less intelligent than people who don’t. This also helps with writing fiction. A basic respect for all people means a basic respect for all characters.

Writing benefits from engagement with the world. Travel is good, and like the writer’s conferences, it’s highly recommended as a way to expand one’s mind. But work can also expand one’s mind. Besides it being a way to pay our bills, it can also be a way to reach out to the world that surrounds us. And reaching out to the world that surrounds us, the non-writing world, is proof of seriousness. In my book, so to speak.

The Chase

30 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in Alchemy of writing, Attention, creating, creativity, ideas, Nancy Peacock, Process, prompt writing, ritual, slowing down, Writer's journey

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Twice a week I teach a prompt writing class. We write to a prompt, provided by me, without editing, thinking, or worrying. The rules are: Let it rip. This past week the prompt was: Running out of something. Here’s what I wrote.

 

This morning, I felt as though I was running out of fresh ideas for prompts. I sat at my desk and looked out the window and said out loud, “I know you’re out there.” The leaves rustled in the breeze showing their white undersides. It felt like a taunt. A tease. “You’re looking too hard,” the leaves said. “You want too much. Your head is too filled.”

I know. I know. I know.

But it doesn’t change the fact that I sometimes feel I am running out of ideas for prompts. And it doesn’t change the fact that I believe there are a million ideas surrounding me that I’m just not capturing. They are like little fairies in the woods. Lithe and free and quick and laughing at the lumbering writer who tries to catch them. They call out, “Here we are. Here we are. Here we are,” and then vanish, a puff of smoke left behind. An idea that could have been mine, but instead remains its own.

I wonder if I shouldn’t go to a mall. Not that there is a store where I can purchase ideas, but that it might help to expose myself to the mass of humanity. Perhaps ideas among people are less illusive. Less playful and teasing. In the mall I might see a mother, harried and stressed, tugging a child behind her like a suitcase – and this might trigger an idea for a prompt, or a story. I might overhear a man tell someone on the other end of his cell phone that he is in a meeting. “Just taking a break,” he adds, realizing his friend might overhear the muzak, the clang of cash registers, the sloosh of Coca-cola descending over a cup of ice.

I might sit in a mall and capture the rhythms of conversation in my notebook. I might find ideas jumping onto the page instead of hiding on the undersides of leaves among the eggs of insects.

The woods are my home. There, a deep peacefulness settles over me. The woods make my mind go cottony like a cloud. Thoughts are less important. They flit through and don’t land. They are like the waterbugs across the surface of the pond. Glittering in the sunlight they skim across the surface before being eaten by turtles and fish. They do no mind being turtle food, or fish food, or eventually fertilizer dropped by a heron lifting off from the branch of a tree. They are afraid of nothing. They are not even afraid to be my ideas, the ones we use for prompts to write about on Friday mornings. But ooh – they do love a chase.

Holding Space for Yourself

16 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in comparison, competition, creating, creativity, emotional safety, Process, prompt writing, ritual, safety, slowing down, Writer's journey

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

In teaching, one of the things I try to do is hold space. In my private prompts classes, we close our eyes and take some deep breaths and get quiet, letting the workweek fall away, the effort that went into getting the kids off the school, the traffic we drove through to reach our destination, all the little niggling energy that we carry with us to the next place. My studio, where I teach my private classes, has, over time, taken on a lot of creative energy from my work there, and the work of others. The space supports our creative endeavors, and the work of holding space is made easier by this concentrated energy. But the energy in my public classes is also concentrated, and held collectively.

The class I teach regularly, for free and open to the public is called Prompt Writing. I teach it in a book store, and here I have a different ritual for opening the space. I ask each person to say their name, and give one or two sentences about their writing practice, and in this way we settle into each other.

I then introduce myself and tell the class what we’re going to do, I give the prompt and we write. There are rules for responding to others’ writing when it’s read out loud, and they are rules I believe in, so I try to enforce them gently, but firmly, and consistently. I do not waver from these rules.

The rules are meant to create a safe space for writers. It’s important. This is what is meant by holding space. Holding space is holding safe space, and there are lots of different ways to do it, and lots of different ways to not do it, or to undo it.

Competition is anti-safe-space holding. Overly critical thinking and analyses also. Hierarchy. Self-promotion. Comparison. Trying to fix something for someone, be it their writing or their life. Sometimes asking digging, probing questions can make a person feel challenged and defended instead of heard.

Recently I have been thinking about how powerful this is, and how I might try the same techniques for myself. In other words, when I am feeling low and anxious, perhaps I could recognize that I need something that’s not being provided and try to provide it. I might try to hold space for myself.

I don’t think it would be any different than holding space for others. The first step would be to get quiet, and the second step would be to create a safe environment for myself. One without competition, without over-thinking, without hierarchy, without self-promotion, without comparison, without trying to fix it, without digging at myself. In fact, when I need to hold space for myself, it’s always because I have let these things in. It’s natural that they should creep in. We live in a world of low thoughts. The trick is to see it, and to say no to it, and to open the space for yourself again.

The Easy Way is Hard Enough

01 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by in Advancing the story, Alchemy of writing, Attention, Observation, Process, Story, Writer's journey, Writing Advice

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

I have an obsession with hand-built houses. To feed my obsession I look at pictures in books with a magnifying glass, and in doing so I become curious about the people who live in these houses. I look closely at their knickknacks, the pictures hanging on the walls, the shampoo they use, and especially the books on their shelves. I am a voyeur. All writers are voyeurs.

I don’t believe that writers are born with special spy genes, or eavesdropping genes, but that early on in our lives, for some reason, we learned to observe. For me honing the skill of observation came from being terribly shy and lacking confidence. Later it was honed further through writing.

One day, looking through my magnifying glass at a picture of a woodworking shop, I read a sign on the wall that said, “The Easy Way is Hard Enough.”

That’s writing, I thought. That’s my writing philosophy. Why fill a room with six characters who stand around invisibly witnessing an important interaction between two characters? Why have a character go to bed, and then get up, and go back to bed, and then get up, and then finally do the thing that needs to be done to advance to story? Keep it simple. The easy way is hard enough.

My first novel, LIFE WITHOUT WATER, grew from my first short story, written for the first writing class I’d taken since high school. The assignment was simple: Write a short story. I had no idea what to write about and I only had a week to do it in. Time ticked by as I stabbed and stabbed at that story. Three days in I was at my kitchen table stabbing some more. I decided to take a walk to clear my mind, and ended up in a used bookstore where I found a small paperback about communes in the sixties. I flipped through the center section of black and white pictures: bearded men chopping wood, naked gardeners, dirty children, a kitchen filled with pans of rising bread dough, a woman outside a shack sawing a board for some repair. I came of age in the sixties. This was my era. These were my people. I knew about these wild reclaimed places with the slippery driveways and the crummy insulation and the snakes in the walls. I’d reclaimed a few myself, and suffered through a few winters, and thrown a lot of wood into a woodstove. While I no longer lived this lifestyle, I still loved these places. I still drove out into the country some times, just to find and visit an old abandoned house.

I purchased the book and decided to write about the reunion of a commune, which quickly became far more than I could handle. All those people who’d once shared an old house had dispersed, abandoned the lifestyle, become what they’d become and had their own stories to tell. Too many stories. The noise of that many characters became too loud and unfocused. And so I decided to write from the point of view of one child who’d grown up on a commune.

This was my first lesson in “The Easy Way is Hard Enough.”

I don’t always know my journey as a writer. I don’t always know my journey as a teacher. I don’t always know my journey as a human being. But I do know journeys, and I have found that “The Easy Way is Hard Enough” is good philosophy for nearly every undertaking – from writing to teaching to cooking a meal to life itself.

The Burning Times

17 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Alchemy of writing, creating, emotional safety, Guidance, Process, self, slowing down, Story, stress

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Years ago, when I first started teaching writing, a woman signed up for my class at the John C. Campbell Folk School in the N.C. mountains because her doctor told her that if she didn’t do something for herself soon, she’d die. She wasn’t looking for a writing class. She didn’t think of writing at all. She was just looking to do something for herself, doctor’s orders, and she ended up in my group. I will call her Gladys.

In this class we wrote from prompts, and read back to each other, and received each others’ writing by recalling what we liked. We weren’t trying to create anything specific – no novels or poems or essays, although we ended up with parts of all of those things. The purpose, though, was to get used to writing as a way of expressing ourselves, and to get comfortable telling stories.

As the week went on, the class became a community, and we became important to each other, and we all found out more about each other. We found out about Gladys’s alcoholic husband. Her demanding adult children. The dishes in the sink and the laundry on the floor. The smack across her face. The black eye she covered with makeup.

We didn’t try to fix these things for her. We didn’t offer advice or even comfort. We didn’t judge in any way. We just responded to the writing, as we did with each person’s work. Write, read, receive, let go, repeat. By doing this we held space for Gladys to speak her truth. That was all.

Gladys wrote the scenes of her life that week. The scenes spooled from her pen and stitched themselves into story. Her story. It may have been the first time she ever told her story, even to herself. Stories are about pattern, and as Gladys wrote she saw the pattern of her life without the distractions of daily drama her situation kept her in.

After that week Gladys went home and left her husband. She rented a small apartment and lived alone. She wrote me a few times about how peaceful her life was now. She thanked me. What had I done? Had I broken up a marriage? No, of course not. I’d only held space with a group of writers for a person to hear her own thoughts. In the burning times, the times when women were being prosecuted as witches and killed, this might have been considered the work of a witch.

Powerful women, smart women, women with property, women who healed others with herbs and deep knowledge, women who were not married, women who lived outside the “norm” were accused of practicing witchcraft. The accused was often tested physically for witchcraft by various means. Some women were put in a chair and dunked in water. If she was a witch, she wouldn’t drown. If she was a normal human being, which she was, she would drown. Another test was called needling, a woman’s skin was pricked and pricked and pricked and pricked with a needle, all over her body, because somewhere on a witch was a bit of flesh that would not bleed. And if she bled, which she did, she was not a witch. And likely dead.

Isn’t it interesting how the tests for witch always leave a woman dead. And isn’t it interesting how Gladys was told she was at death’s door if she didn’t do something for herself.

I think that before the writing class, Gladys’s life was the equivalent to being needled. She was pricked and pricked and pricked and pricked by an abusive husband. Pricked too by a society that didn’t care about her as a human being. Likely pricked by things she’d learned and absorbed as a child, about how a woman needs to make sacrifices, stand by her man, have dinner on the table at a certain time, etc. etc. etc. Thankfully Gladys had someone in her life, a doctor, who could see beyond immediate medical needs into the soul of a woman who needed, simply, to do something for herself. And thankfully the thing she chose to do was attend my writing class. And thankfully, even though I was new to teaching, I was able to create an environment where, for one week, Gladys could be with her story. She could tell it and have it received. As the week went on she began to understand the concept of emotional safety, and she began to see that she didn’t have that at home.

At the end of the week Gladys wrote a piece about coming down off the mountain and ending her marriage. We responded to it as we had responded to everything else. Without judgement. None of us knew if Gladys would leave her husband or not, but we could see that the week had affected her, and that she was stronger for it. The space we provided for writing gave her space to trust herself.

This is the alchemy of writing. In my work as a teacher, I’ve witnessed this alchemy again and again, women and men coming back to themselves, hearing themselves, hearing each other, becoming stronger. I’ve seen the tough and guarded made vulnerable. I’ve seen the meek and voiceless start to speak up for themselves. I’ve seen barriers break down and humanity show through. I’ve seen tears burst forth from my writing prompts, not because my prompts are so great, but because the process and the safe space I create in my workshops allow people to reach deep inside themselves and bring forth their truth. Be it fiction, memoir, poetry, essay – writing is always about truth. Art is always about relationship to self.

And frankly, if bringing people to writing, bring people to themselves, is the work of witch then I accept it. Even in these burning times.