The cover of Escaping Into The Open by Elizabeth Berg
Today’s writing prompt is from author Elizabeth Berg’s excellent book on writing, Escaping Into The Open (page 61).
You are given a box of clothes from someone extremely close to you who died suddenly. Write a scene of your sorting through these clothes.
This may be of assistance if you need reminding (t-shirt available from Cafepress)
For many years, somewhere in the back of my head, I clung to the idea that to be able to call yourself a writer, you need to be published.
That, of course, is nonsense.
To be a writer, there is one overarching criterion.
You need to write.
And keep on writing. That’s it. Just write.
A few years after I finished my BA degree in Art, I had to write down my occupation on my marriage certificate. At the time my ‘occupation’ involved doing temp work, admin stuff, shuffling papers and answering telephones. I stood at the altar and held the pen in my hand and hesitated. I thought, ‘this is for posterity, I’m not putting the word secretary on this document’.
Then my inner critic (disguised as the Voice of Reason) started up. ‘Sure, you’ve got the piece of paper that says you studied art for four years, but do you think you can call yourself an artist? Seriously? You haven’t even had a solo show, your current day job is completely uncreative, you don’t even own any floaty dresses…’ (floaty dresses were obligatory for artists at that time).
I wrote ‘artist’, but I felt like a fraud. Making art wasn’t my day job. Okay, I was painting and drawing and writing, but not nine-to-five. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to write ‘secretary’. That was my job, but not who I was. I look back now at my marriage certificate with the word ‘artist’ on it, and I think, of course I was an artist…why did I hesitate or doubt that?
Here’s why: I had fallen for the lie that to be able to call yourself something, you need to make a living from it. Have it pay your bills, feed you, clothe you. But that’s not true.
Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. Nobody would question that he was an artist.
These days, writing is not my nine-to-five. It’s my 10pm or my 5.26am or my lunch break or the blessed forty minutes of my son’s unexpected nap. But I have learned to call myself a writer, because that’s what I am. I must write. I cannot go a day without writing. It’s what I do.
I don’t broadcast that I’m a writer. But I tell myself.
You may be a published writer or an unpublished writer. You may still be working out the mechanics or spectacularly accomplished. You may struggle over each word or breeze through pages. Your sentences may be disciplined or wild, bold or mild, furious or peaceful. But if you write, every day, if you sit down and face the blank page or the blank screen and fill it with words, with the contents of your mind, with whatever pours or stutters or spurts out, then you’re a writer.
Don’t be ashamed or coy or reluctant about owning it. ‘I am a writer’. You can admit it. Hey, you’re even allowed to say it out loud.
It feels good, and perhaps it’s a first step towards taking yourself seriously as a writer (though not too seriously in general). As a writer, you’re armed to tackle writing goals. You may journal every day, craft a memoir for your family, finish a manuscript, or gobsmack the literary world. Publish or don’t publish. Whatever.
But you’re a writer. So write.
I want to share this TED talk from writer Elizabeth Gilbert.
It was filmed in 2009, in between what she terms the ‘freakish’ success of her novel Eat, Pray, Love, and the release of her next book. She put the talk together whilst grappling with the knowledge that although she may have another forty years of work ahead of her as a writer, she may never again create a work that touches as many people as Eat, Pray, Love.
This wasn’t simply an internal fear or paranoia – Gilbert says that people often came up to her to ask if she was afraid; afraid that the highlight of her career may already be behind her, afraid of never again writing anything so successful, afraid of failure. And so she asks: Where does that kind of pressure leave someone with decades of work still left ahead of her?
The weight of that question, she suggests, has been responsible for the ruin of many artists over the past 500 years. In her words:
We have completely internalised and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked, and that artistry in the end will always ultimately lead to anguish.
It’s so true. The stereotypes of struggling creatives are perpetuated time and again.
The starving artist.
The alcoholic writer.
The drug-addled musician.
We don’t even stop to question these portraits any more, it’s as if the adjectives and nouns are bound together.
Gilbert says that she has been looking for models to help her find a way of avoiding the well-documented kind of artistic despair that results in reaching for gin at 9am in the morning. She has traced one model back to the ancient Romans and Greeks. It is the idea that the individual is not the fount of all creativity when they are engaged in their work. Instead, they are conduits for creative, divine forces that work through them to assist in the creation of their art.
The Romans called this force ‘genius’, and the Greeks called it ‘daimon’. It is the idea that the artist is a vessel through which creative energies, or divine forces, or the universe, or God, or mystical spirits, or [insert whatever other term you might wish to call it – ‘Bob’ might work best for you], can flow and help us to create works that are inspired, and ultimately greater than anything that we could have achieved on our own.
This idea provides the artist with both protection and some distance. They can’t take all the credit for great work, so narcissism and ego are diminished. Neither can they take all the responsibility for a flop. Creating art becomes a co-production – you and the Universe. Communities of ancient Greeks and Romans understood this. It took the pressure off individuals, gave them the space to work and create more freely. When the Renaissance came along and turned the world into one where the individual was the centre of the world, Gilbert argues that it wasn’t necessarily the best outcome for artists.
The book cover of Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
In late 2015, Gilbert released a non-fiction title called Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. I recently read the book, and I could see how her TED talk seven years ago was the beginning of a rumination about creative struggles, and how to get on with the business of living.
The book is part-memoir, part creative cheerleader, part permission slip (for those that need one), and wholehearted endorsement of the straight-up joy of letting go and allowing yourself to truly live a creative life.
Gilbert writes with such emotional honesty in Big Magic, it’s hard not to be seduced by her writing. As a writer who struggles with a ferocious inner critic and sometimes crippling fear of judgment, I found myself glued to much of what Gilbert had to say. The idea of divine creative forces at work certainly takes the pressure off – and has given me an opportunity to get to know my Muse a little better.
I saw Gilbert speak a few years ago at a writers’ festival, where she laughed about people saying Eat, Pray, Love was a ‘brave’ book to write because it was so personal (a memoir covering everything from her divorce to her cystitis). She admitted that she had no filter (and had to learn that it was ok to have an unspoken thought), and that the book’s ‘brave’ content was essentially what she’d tell the person standing next to her at a bus stop.
Whether it’s habit or bravery, the truth in her work is compelling, and the divinely bestowed creative forces that Gilbert spoke of in the TED talk are clearly at work in her. I don’t know if sales of her later books have, or ever will, surpass Eat, Pray, Love, but it matters none – her writing is magic.
Note: this article was written on 22 February, 2014
Eleanor Catton (right) being interviewed on stage at the 2014 Perth Writers’ Festival
I attended writer Eleanor Catton’s PWF author talk today. I find it diabolical that she is 28 years old and has already published two great novels to such acclaim. She recently won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for The Luminaries, her second novel and the book she is currently touring.
I had a front row seat and my iPad ready to take notes, but a couple of minutes in I shut it down. It was the most interesting session I attended at the festival, and I didn’t want to be focused anywhere else.
Catton described the book as an astrological murder mystery, though more of a mystery than about murder. Woven into The Luminaries‘ structure are the twelve signs of the zodiac, Jung’s twelve archetypes, the Golden Ratio, and an attempt to create a writing loop akin to the loops of Godel (mathematics), Escher (art) and Bach (music). The author went into fascinating detail about the complex structure of the novel, and if you’re interested she describes it far better than I could in this piece in The Guardian.
What I want to write about here happened after the session. I joined a well-kinked snake of a queue and after an hour Catton signed my copies of The Luminaries and The Rehearsal (her first novel). We chatted as she kindly defaced my books, and I asked if she felt exposed after being alone writing for such a long period; she said The Luminaries had taken five years to write – ‘2 years of thinking and three of actual writing’.
Catton said yes, she felt very exposed,
‘Especially because other people have been reading my characters, they know all about them, but they’re mine and there’s something private about them because they’re mine, and it’s weird that other people know about them now’.
I also asked about being a writer, specifically whether Catton thought the way to become a better writer is just to write, or if it’s important to study writing. I asked because she completed her Masters at the much-lauded Iowa Writers’ Workshop and now lectures at the Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland.
She had a think, and then said it was important to do what works for you. She added that in doing her Masters, she found a really close group of writers to interact with.
‘The thing about studying is the conversations you have, the intense discussions about ideas and concepts (Catton made a compacting motion with her hands, like patting at an invisible football of playdough). I would never have had that discussion about Godel, Escher and Bach if it wasn’t for that group.’
I hadn’t thought about that angle. Whenever I think about study, I think about learning new skills, and honing existing ones. Studying creative writing makes me think of technique, structure, characterisation, etc. But Catton was talking about conversations and debates with other writers, the kind that stir you up, inspire you, point you in directions that you would not have gone without them.
Writing is such a solitary pursuit. Catton’s comments reminded me that discussing your work – or concepts within your work – with others, particularly other writers, can help to inform your own practice, and make theirs fuller too. In studying, you learn as much from other students as from your teacher.
A final note: during her talk, Catton was asked if there was any advice that she would pass on to other writers. She quoted:
‘If your novel starts happy, it must get happier, if it starts sad, it must get sadder.’
which was advice that she had been given by one of her own teachers.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no luddite. I use plenty of online tools to get and stay organised – Outlook for emails and meetings, Asana for managing and tracking team projects, Dropbox for document sharing and transfers…
But as a writer, I love my hard-copy diary and planner.
Pen on paper. Tactile. Real. Magic.
It wasn’t always this way. When I got my first smart phone in 2008, I abandoned the way of the papyrus and tapped everything into that little electronic wedge of delight. It was compact, lighter and easier to carry around, and I didn’t need to scrabble in the depths of my handbag for leaky pens.
But I lost a few things by going digital. The act of inputting text by tapping at a touch screen is completely removed from making your mark on paper – even iPhone 7’s digital touch/handwriting feature doesn’t come near the experience it’s trying to simulate.
You lose not only the tactile act of penmanship, but all the things that your handwriting gives away about you. The scratchy red pencil you use to scrawl in your first dentist appointment in five years. The movie night in smooth cursive script that’s decorated with little stars. A diary is a record, and my digital versions were too clean, too sanitised, too efficient. Flicking through old online calendars, everything looked the same. As if anybody could have lived that year. Yet when I pick up my old hard-copy diaries, they’re relics, full of much more than just appointments and shopping lists and reminders.
There’s also the time issue. It takes longer to ‘input’ a tapped diary entry than to handwrite a diary note, so I found that I abbreviated to save time and RSI. Consciously shortening everything I wrote in my smart phone meant succumbing to half-words, chat acronyms, dodgy emoticons, and chipping away a little more at the English language, not to mention MY WORD-WORSHIPPING WRITER’S SOUL.
So I went back to hard-copy printed paper diaries.
Page-to-a-day, two-page spread to a week, month-at-a-glance…there are many types of old-school diaries and planners to choose from, and over the years I’ve been through most of them. As a late-teen-early-twenty-something I was all about Filofax (despite catching skin in the snappy metal ring-binder way too many times). A few years later I fell for the romanticised history of Moleskine (Picasso and Hemingway used them! Well…actually, no…but they used something similar). Then this past year I discovered one that has worked better than all the rest for me as a writer and creative.
I’ve been using one of Leonie Dawson’s hand-illustrated ‘Create Your Shining Year‘ diaries (yes! that’s an affiliate link) because it’s beautiful. Equally important, it keeps me and my writing accountable. Anyone can use them, but they do seem to have a cult following among creatives (possibly because Leonie is an artist and writer…not to mention unicorn-loving hippy and kick-arse businesswoman). They also tend to sell out as there’s a limited print run.
Aside from the basic calendar and to-do lists, I have come to covet my Shining Year diary because it includes:
So that’s what I’ve been using. I’d love to hear about the kind of diary that you use – or if you bother with one at all? Are you digital or analogue? Pixel or print? Personal secretary or completely disorganised? Let me know by commenting below – and as always, thanks for reading.
Note: I also use Leonie’s annual workbooks (there’s one for Business, and another edition for Life), so if you’re into unicorns and getting your shit together and making stuff happen they’re a fantastic tool, and work in conjunction with the diary.
Free writing can be done by hand or electronically. Just let it flow.
Whenever I sit down to write, I generally start with writing practice. Even when I’m in the middle of a story and itching to get straight back into it, I’ll still spend five minutes free writing (because there are some benefits I’ll mention in a moment).
What is free writing? It’s an opportunity to flex the wild, unbridled, uncritical side of your writing brain without trying to steer it in any direction. Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg are two influential writers who have written a lot about free writing, and it goes something like this:
Free writing is the best antidote I know to writer’s block. Since I’ve made it a part of my daily writing practice, I rarely get stuck for creative story ideas. The two short stories that I am currently working on both emerged during free writing sessions (from where, I cannot tell you – they just showed up).
If you’ve never tried free writing before, you may be confused about where to start. But it really is as simple as sitting down and starting to take dictation from your brain. Maybe think of it as capturing your inner monologue.
Some days your free writing may come out as a rant about the weather or interest rates or your water bill, but on others it will look at the fading yellow flowers outside your window and recall a favourite pair of boots you had as a kid that you wore to a party and took off to jump on a trampoline and then lost and cried about for two days. Aside from throwing up all sorts of treasure and debris, free writing has a tendency to recklessly drive you to places you’ve long forgotten.
If there’s nothing on the table in front of you, or out the window, or hanging on that wall over there, that grabs your attention as a starting place, then one of these three writing prompts will get you going. Just pick one and write the prompt words over and over until something comes out.
Alternatively, go somewhere, anywhere, and write whatever’s around you. A cafe, a zoo, a park bench. A change of environment can often help your free writing to flow in a completely different direction.
Free writing is a writing technique that helps you to bypass your internal censor and tap into deeper levels of thinking. Your expectations are low, because you’re not thinking about writing well, or even producing something that makes sense, you’re just dipping into your thoughts as they race through your mind.
When I’m in the middle of writing a story, the reason I always sit down and start my writing practice with a little free writing is that it often helps me to solve problems in my story. I don’t do my free writing with my work-in-progress in mind, but I find that my brain has been quietly working away at the story since I put it aside in my last writing sessions, and free writing gives it a chance to purge whatever it’s come up with.
A final word from Natalie Goldberg on free writing:
Don’t be abstract. Write the real stuff. Be honest and detailed.
Writing Down the Bones, page 21.
When you’re free writing, it’s turning yourself inside out. You’re mining your own mind, your own resources and reactions and perceptions, your own body memory. You have experiences, thoughts, feelings, emotions, scars, memories, desires, triumphs, regrets…a lifetime of complexity, and a way of seeing the world that is unique. As a creative writer, accessing yourself through free writing will bring to the surface a mass of things to write about, and they’ll be things that resonate with you. Things you care about. They will feed stories you feel compelled to tell.
I think that the key to free writing is to come to it without an agenda. Just do it and see. Like most worthwhile pursuits, it is regular practice that makes it work.
Cover of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
I own too many books about writing, mainly because they provide a deceptively productive way of procrastinating from my writing practice. Some I have abandoned after the first chapter. Some I reference when I need to. Others have become favourites that I have read over and over.
One of my writing books lives permanently on the crooked bookshelf beside my bed. Its pages are yellowed and soft, and it lies open at any page easily. I have delved into it weekly since I carried it home. This luminous book is Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, by Natalie Goldberg. It was first published in 1986 and has sold over a million copies.
If you’re ever feeling stuck or brain-fogged when it comes to writing, or if you just want to read some good, clean writing that cuts through everything, this is the book to have at hand. When I’m staring at the screen and running around in mental circles, I’ll pick up the book and within minutes I’ll be calm and detangled and think, ‘Hey, as a writer, this is what matters’.
I discovered Writing Down the Bones a few years ago at Perth’s annual Save The Children second-hand book sale in Winthrop Hall. I was drawn to its cover, and the idea of writing having ‘bones’. I started reading at the beginning, but soon began jumping through chapters all over the place. Some are a couple of pages, others longer. I want to say that you can open the book at any page and find something to help you (which is true), but that makes the book sound like a self-help manual. It’s not.
Natalie Goldberg speaking at Upaya Zen Center. Photo credit: Joan Halifax on Flickr.
It is, however, a comfort, a trigger for inspiration, a catalyst for exploration, a reminder of stuff we know but too often forget, and a personal account of the writing journey by a great writer. The thing that I come back to, time and again, is Goldberg’s suggestion of sitting down and writing, just writing freely, straight out of your head onto the page, hand moving constantly, no editing or deleting or backspacing, no set agenda of what you’re going to write, just letting it out and following where it goes without judging or trying to control the content. Ten minutes of free writing, timed, go for it. Or half an hour. Or whatever you’re up for that day.
As a creative writer, too often I tell myself what I must write, or what I should be writing, instead of letting my mind and body tell me. I forget to get quiet and listen to what’s inside, instead of looking outside for things to write about. All it takes is for me to sit down at the kitchen table, start writing about the colour of the apple in the bowl in front of me, and it will trigger a memory of a similarly green dress that my grandmother sewed for me as a child, and how she later sewed a green velvet dress for my high school ball, and how the complicated boning in the dress stuck into my hips all night while my first ever (thoroughly bejewelled) high heels murdered my toes – yet they’re still at the back of my wardrobe somewhere – and then how my one-year old son saw a photo of me in that dress and pointed and said ‘mummy’, even though it was taken twenty years ago.
At any point in such a textual wander your mind can latch onto a fact or an image or a sliver of memory and run with it to a place you never consciously planned to visit. Writing Down the Bones is about being present to capture these ‘first thoughts’, the raw stuff that emerges unbidden from daydreams, things that your mind seizes up, throws into your vision, and that you catch and write on the fly. I have repeatedly experienced the way Goldberg’s ideas lead to fresh, surprising writing, and would encourage any writer to pick up a copy and absorb a little bit of her Zen writing wisdom.
A woman discovers a suitcase in the attic of a house she is renting with her fiance.
With her fiance watching, she breaks the locks and opens the case. They look inside. Her future husband tells her she must call the police. Immediately.
She refuses to call the police.
What happens next?
You are hosting a gathering.
You are able to invite any three people from any period in history. They do not necessarily need to be famous.
When they come to the party, you, and all of them, are 18 years old.
Write about what happens from the moment you greet your first guest.
