Making It Up As You Go Along
In my last newsletter1, I delved into the realms of spirit writing and automatic writing. Here’s a quick recap:
Spirit Writing: Taking dictation from, or communing with, an “other.”
Automatic Writing: Generating texts whilst cognitively distracted.
Trance Speech: Generating speech while in a slightly disassociated/dull state.
In this newsletter, I’ll get nerdy about two more liminal-mind writing processes:
Freewriting: Writing anything that comes to mind for a set time, without stopping.
Improvisation: Writing by exploring associations and using the “Yes, and…” technique.
“Spiritual Windshield Wipers”—& so much more
In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron advises doing what she calls morning pages, or three pages of longhand writing “written strictly off the top of your head.” They help “siphon off” distracting thoughts in order to think more clearly—acting essentially as “spiritual windshield wipers”.2
That’s probably the most well-known understanding of how freewriting functions. It’s liberating! The constant judge at your shoulder can take a cigarette break.
But the line between freewriting and writing can be wherever we draw it. Poet Tommy Pico’s process for writing his poetry book Feed (2019) fits the definition of freewriting, yet he doesn’t use that word:
Monday through Thursday I wrote as much as I could without the editor voice. The goal was production. I wrote as much as possible and the only goal was that I couldn’t think about what I was doing. Then Fridays I would slash and burn upwards of 80 percent of that week’s word haul. Anything that stayed had to earn its keep. Saturdays and Sundays were for sandwich eating and sandwich eating only.3
I love freewriting in part because its principles can be guidelines for engendering a self-forgiving, imaginative, permissive, and productive state of mind. (And I’ll come back to Tommy Pico’s work momentarily!)
Self-Revelation
Poet and doctor William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) wrote his book Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920) by freewriting and/or improvising (depending on your definition) every single night for a year.
Even if I had nothing in my mind at all I put something down, and as may be expected, some of the entries were pure nonsense…4
- William Carlos Williams
Here’s an example of an entry:
VI I Of course history is an attempt to make the past seem stable and of course it’s all a lie. Nero must mean Nero or the game’s up. But—though killies have green backs and white bellies, zut! for the bass and hawks! When we’re tired of swimming we’ll go climb in the ledgy forest. Confute the sages.
Of the 365 entries, 86 ended up in the final book, many of which were paired with little commentaries that he wrote after the fact - like this one:
XI
1
Why pretend to remember the weather two years back? Why not? Listen close then repeat after others what they have just said and win a reputation for vivacity. Oh feed upon petals of edelweiss! one dew drop, if it be from the right flower, is five years' drink!
-------------
Having once taken the plunge the situation that preceded it becomes obsolete which a moment before was alive with malignant rigidities.
Thirty-seven years after it was published (and 6 years before his death), Williams stated that Kora was “the one book I have enjoyed referring to more than any of the others,” adding, “it reveals myself to me.”5
I too have noticed this self-revelatory quality. It was, in fact, from a disparate set of freewriting sessions that I eventually extracted the contents of my first chapbook.
Looking (years later) at freewriting I’d created over a lengthy period of time, I was surprised to find that despite the variety, the same themes consistently appeared—anger, and struggles against oppression—which reflected my then still mostly visceral understanding of misogyny and toxic masculinity, before I had learned to name these.
Rereading my old freewriting was like studying my own private archaeology—and after much tinkering and schlock-cutting, it also gave me a cohesive set of poems.
Writing Challenge: Freewriting
Set a timer (start with 5 minutes, and work up to 15–20).
Start writing!
Don’t stop, edit, correct, or cross anything out.
Extra Challenges:
Try limiting your authorial voice: write only in the third person, the second person, or the first person plural.6
Try making stuff up, even if you’re writing from your own point of view—for example, try disallowing autobiographical or observation-based material.
Wait a while to read what you wrote—weeks, months, or years!
Interlude/Canceled Section: Portraits of the Mind
When I planned this newsletter, I thought I was going to write about stream-of-consciousness (or SOC). However, I soon realized SOC is actually the odd duck in this series, since to me, it isn’t so much writing from a liminal mind, but about it. I think it’s most often a technique writers use to depict a character’s inner world—so it’s consciously, deliberately composed. That doesn’t mean it’s not fascinating! But it’s not quite right for this particular series, so I’ll bid it adieu—for now.
A Tangle of Tools
You already have a lifetime of experience with improvising. Each day you generate sensible, interesting statements spontaneously, in conversations. Creative improvisation is similar—it just requires a little courage to be both nonsensical and unimpressive (yet sometimes amazing!).
Improvising doesn’t utilize one single technique. Instead, it’s akin to an artist standing before a blank canvas with an array of different tools (paintbrushes, pens, buckets, spray bottles, rubber stamps, feathers, glue, cut-up magazines, stickers, etc), and then—in real time, without planning or erasing (mostly)—making a work of art.
Connectivity & Process
In 2017 I launched a collaborative performance practice called the Improv Poetry Orchestra. A poet writes improvisatory poetry on a laptop at a desk onstage, which is projected onto a screen behind her. Musicians onstage read the writing as it’s being generated, and everyone improvises in response to—and in tandem with—each other.
It’s absolutely thrilling to participate in, and can make for engaging performances. Below is a screenshot recording (from the writer’s point of view) of a performance I participated in (I was the poet).
I share this not because it’s particularly great poetry (it isn’t) but because the process was great. A baby crying in the audience spurred the first words I wrote, which spurred the rest of the poem. The audience, musicians, and I made the piece together.7
Improvisatory writing (and any form of creative improv) can be a profoundly connective process. It draws disparate people and/or ideas together (connective), and it’s centered around the act of creation (process) rather than around either artistic intentions or a final product. And although I’ll grant it can take a lot of guts, it’s not hard to become skilled at it—with some tools and practice.
“Yes, And”
Improv comedy’s famous rule-of-thumb, “Yes, and,” emphasizes the importance of:
1) accepting the character or scene a colleague initiates (“Yes”), and
2) adding something related but new to it (“and”).
When improvising poetry, whether alone or in a group, it’s just as handy a dictum. Whatever you write, say “yes” to it. Then let it direct the next thing you write.
With non-improv or “regular” writing, you’re trying to fit things mutually together—all the parts have equal potential power. With improv writing, power passes like a hot potato. Each subsequent element helps determine the element that follows, simply by paying attention to things like:
the sensory situation in which you’re writing
memories or ideas associated with a word, and the resulting stepladder of consecutive, tangential ideas and memories
sonic similarities
translations and transmutations—leaping from:
a physical description to its emotional counterpart
past to future
place to person
rightness to wrongness to middle-way-ness
truth to fiction
…and so on!
If you practice noticing the many associations that orbit any given word, object, situation, idea, or memory, you’ll get more adept at quickly improvising.
Re-Presenting Improvisations
After you’ve created an improvised text, you can enhance it in some composed way, just as Williams did when he provided commentary to go with his “improvisations.” Enhancements can take the form of editing, footnotes, end notes, illustrations, photographs, graphic presentation on the page if the poem is printed, or dances, gestures, and props if the poem is performed.
I once sang an improvised 10-minute song—essentially a sung persona poem—from the point of view of a friend in the final months of her life.8 Because it was an improvisation, it mixed real memories of things she’d said, with adjacent associations.
Later, I transcribed what I’d sung, put a shape to the text, used greyed-out fonts to de-emphasize some parts, and added some footnotes. Here’s one page:
Start to finish, it was a deeply cathartic process for me, as I mourned the loss of this friend and attempted to honor her.
Writing Challenge: Guided Improvisations
I’ve recorded two brief, guided improvisation writing exercises which I hope will reproduce—however approximately—my process when I’m improvising poetry.
Poetry Improvisation Guide #1 (5:23 long)
Poetry Improvisation Guide #2 (6:22 long)
Grab a writing tool and listen, or use the transcription and your own stopwatch.
In closing, I’ll circle back to poet Tommy Pico, because his extraordinary writing contains—or at least seems to contain—freewriting, improvisation, and stream-of-consciousness to boot—while also being finely-honed and deliberate.
Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017) is a brilliant example. Here’s one excerpt—if you like that, you can read the first 13 pages of the book for free on the publisher’s website here (PDF) - or purchase the book.
Notice the large-scale and midscale structural coherence alongside the moment-to-moment topical and emotional leaps and changes; the associative chains of thought; the first-person voice narrating (translating?) what feels to me absolutely like a mindscape’s stream. It’s brilliant writing that suggests liminality in its origins, and editing mastery in its execution.
What’s Next?
In January, in the third and final part of this series on writing from the liminal mind, I’ll invite you to join me on the dubious-yet-thrilling chase after the coherence (?!) of the half-asleep mind!
After that, I’ll launch a series on poetry revision techniques, which will complement and augment my upcoming workshop on that same topic.
Happy New Year!
To help new readers to get an idea of my newsletter, I’ve made the first one freely available to everyone, so you’re welcome to share it!
Julia Cameron, Introduction, The Artist’s Way Journal, Penguin, USA, 2010.
Ten Questions for Tommy Pico - Poets & Writers
Webster Schott, Introduction to Kora in Hell: Improvisations, in an anthology of Williams’ work, Imaginations, edited by W. Schott, 1970.
Ibid.
I’ve found writing in the first-person plural (“we”) to be particularly useful. It’s a way of being both the speaker and an amorphous conglomerate, which distances me somewhat from whatever I am writing, helps to defang my shoulder-judge, and makes it easier to write about difficult personal topics.
It’s worth noting that this is probably the most narrative & straightforward poem generated by the Improv Poetry Orchestra—they are usually (deliciously) strange and abstract.
As I improvised, a colleague did electronicky things to my voice in real time, and later made a video to go with the recording.