MemeMachineGo!

Still doing the exercises in The Right to Write. Good stuff, and Writing Down the Bones is an excellent complement. Points they're both drumming home:

• Writing doesn't have to be hard. Just sit down and write. Don't make a big deal out of it.

• Write because it's good for you. Meant in the same way Buddhists teach the eightfold path — don't follow it because you 'ought to', or you're a bad person if you don't (of course, if you think that's what you're doing, you're not following it) — it's what will make you happier, so go ahead and do what'll make you happy. A far cry from the way Christian mores were taught me in Catholic Sunday school, and the way a lot of people think of the values of the major Western religions, but I know there are also people, especially on the more mystic end of the Western religions, who approach them the same way. But I digress.

• It's not about you: let the writing write itself; you're the instrument through whom it flows. Get your ego out of the way and all its concern for whether you're writing's good enough, whether you're revealing too much about yourself, whether people will like you if you write that. Let it flow. (This follows from the previous two and is almost redundant to state.)
  

Learning to write involves moving in two directions: learning craft — structure, prose, organizing sentences and paragraphs and scenes, how to set a scene, how to describe a character, how to foreshadow and build suspense, and a million other things... and unlearning all the fetters on creativity we tend to acquire on our ways to adulthood — returning to Beginner's Mind, letting the inner child come out to play, however you conceive it.

I've concentrated on the former for most of the past several years, and I think I'm pretty good at structure and craft. More recently, for instance with my improv practice (which I've been doing for a year) I've been pursuing the latter. And I'm enjoying the results.

I'm still doing morning pages. And I'm starting to get the hang of this stream of consciousness thing. The past two mornings they've been largely without punctuation. To appreciate what this means, you have to understand how pedantic I am.

Now to make the time to do more than exercises and write some stories.

[Originally posted to Death Upon My Shoulder; subsequently merged into MemeMachineGo!]