* Write a letter to a writer whose work has left an everlasting impression upon you.
* Write a letter to one of your readers.
* Write a fan letter to yourself.
* Reply to fanmail sent to you.
* Write a letter in which you give advice back to yourself on writing (or any other matter) in the manner of a worldwise author with a fanbase.
If you really want to get into the spirit of Joanna Rakoff’s book, type your letter on a typewriter, or pen it on Hello Kitty stationery (or paper of your own craziness/choosing).
Back in December I started to keep a diary again. I’m using Day One, which is a very handy app. It lets me sync entries in the cloud straightaway across my computer, phone and iPad, so it’s easy to update while I’m on the hoof, at my desk, sitting on a train. I can even dictate something while I’m walking the dog. I can also add photos, a record of the temperature, and my geolocation, if I wish, and tag entries, and, e.g., organise specific gardening records as a separate group of entries, and it can even provide prompts if you desire them. I can also set a daily reminder; given it is 10 p.m. right now, this might explain why various entries of late involve Celebrity Big Brother.
One thing that perhaps has halted diary-keeping at other times of my life has been the fact that I made it into too much of a duty: recording everything that I did became a chore. I was always playing catch-up. Now I just let myself add a few lines about whatever: a moment, a sequence of events, an image, a thought. If I forget, I can add something late at night as I’m going to bed – just a couple of lines are sufficient, and sometimes sufficient is all that is necessary, and even preferable.
Sometimes I hear people talk about ‘journaling’, which can seem a bit precious. I want to say that ‘journal’ is not a verb. The process can get a bit self-consciously introspective, particularly when we get lots of ‘thoughts’ and ‘feelings’. Which is fine if that rocks your boat, I guess. But I cringe at the idea of rereading the gutspillings in old journals from, e.g., the year I lived in Albuquerque as an undergraduate, or the era (nay, epoch) of my coming out (eek!). But when I am brave enough to reread, I do find myself surprised from time to time, and wistful about my former self (that person I still am).
In my current diary writing, I’m inspired by an entry from the diary of Audrey Bright (great name!), mother of writer and teacher Elaine Kingett:
Had hair done, Japanese surrendered.
I guess 1945 had plenty to record! And maybe that unconscious mix of the global and the introspective and the everyday is what makes the diary an exciting form. Writing on the fly.
A few further random thinkings.
* Blogging is a contemporary variation on keeping a diary. I guess what is avowedly different about blogging is its public dimension. The public persona we create. But some bloggers achieve great transparency in their blogs, even a confessional quality. I think of the frankness of perception in Bhanu Kapil’s blog, where she (among other things) has shared many of the forays into the writing of her new book Ban En Banlieue, alongside which her blog sits as a sister project.
* The entry that came up when I looked up Bhanu’s blog is, ironically, about losing one of her notebooks. Eek! Guess that is a disadvantage of paper and pen, as I once found out myself when I left one on a British Airways plane that flew us from Denver to London.
* I also think of the Rogue Notebooks (at least 33 of them?!) in which Bhanu created Ban along the way.
* I mostly use it for sharing links to stories I find interesting, but Twitter could be another variation on the form of keeping a diary, though I find that a lot of the content tends towards the, um, reactive rather than observational, and we often encounter a certain, um, unregulated and opining (even hysterical) quality of showing off to some people’s outpourings. Shut up already. (Though maybe some diaries really do amount to opining hysteria more than anything else?! And I guess this is all justifiable expression too. Just don’t be surprised when people unfollow you.) What can be more interesting to me are tweets that follow a more consistent pace, though off hand I’m struggling to come up with someone who’s tweets really feel like a diary – do suggest if you know of someone. I do like the compression of 140 characters, for sure.
* I’m thinking of Bobbie Louise Hawkins’s overheard dialogue exercises, in which we record snatches of overheard dialogue we capture unexpectedly in everyday life and bring them to our fiction workshop every week.
* Alan Bennett’s diaries are very entertaining and insightful. (But then Alan Bennett is very entertaining and insightful.)
* Virginia Woolf’s diaries are fantastic. They have this direct and energetic wit. Though I love the sentences in her novels, I find her diaries (and letters) much more interesting than most of her fiction. However much I try, Clarissa Dalloway, you are a bore. Orlando is more fun, but nothing beats the nuggets about T.S. Eliot coming to dinner in April 1919.
* I guess diaries can enjoy a gossipy quality that is a lot of fun.
* I like thinking about what we call these things we write in. Composition notebooks invite us to compose. Exercise books emphasise the fact that everything is just an exercise, an attempt, and we don’t need to goal ourselves on final-draft excellence – not least as that simply doesn’t exist. Notebooks collect notes, and notes can be as random as what we want. (But feel free to compose in an exercise book, should you prefer.) So: diaries as spaces for composition, exercises, notes.
* I’m thinking of Lynda Barry’s sensational book Syllabus, which describes the diary exercises she tasks her classes with. See the photo above. She adds on a facing page:
Intentionally keeping a daily diary is difficult and usually a drag to write and a drag to read. A more interesting diary of a very different sort will spontaneously show itself if we begin to put bits and pieces of everything that concerns us through the day in one place: the composition notebook.
I love Lynda’s Quick Diary Format, not least as I love its focus on sense events in the outside world, rather than interior musings, and I love lists: seven to ten things that you did; seven to ten things that you saw; something you heard said; a picture of something you saw. To help with this, on the page of a notebook she draws daily diary frames that prompt invite their filling in.
(More on Syllabus and St Lynda another time. This book requires a review. In particular, we need to look at her use of spirals.)
For this week’s writing experiment (or this year’s? this lifetime’s?): start a diary. Go for at least a month, though really it might be good to go for a longer span: a season (three months), a year, maybe longer?
(And okay, this is the end of January, rather than the start of the year. But January is the month of failed resolutions, so maybe February is maybe a better place to begin?)
(And time is an imaginary construct, right, isn’t it?!)
The important part of this exercise: choosing a form, then sticking with it for a block of time. It mustn’t be a drag. It must be as spontaneous and easy and instinctive as possible. Some suggestions:
* Buy yourself a composition notebook or an exercise book or decomposition book, and fill it. Maybe, though, give yourself a target: write on a page every day (you don’t even have to fill it), or create your own frames for your own Quick Diary Format.
* As a variation of that: buy yourself an appointment calendar or diary or five-year diary, and fill the inch or so it gives you every day.
* Write a haiku a day. Again, we find that concrete target: seventeen syllables, observations of nature and the seasons – or create your own focus and constraints, e.g., life in Santa Fe, as observed by my friend Mary Kite.
* Instagram a photo a day. (Without the exhibitionist hashtags. Sorry, am being too prescriptive. I just dislike showing off. Do what you want.)
* Maybe don’t do Twitter, unless you’re really good at it. Just saying, though rise to the challenge of the form, e.g., not showing off.
I first encountered writers writing manifestos in a serious and active way when I was doing my MFA at Naropa. During earlier literary studies, I had come across avant-garde artists writing declarative statements of intent – I’m thinking in particular of the Surrealist Manifesto.
At Naropa, writers bring to life the practice of the manifesto in a manner that really seems present and urgent. Anne Waldman in particular encourages the writing of manifestos in her teaching and activism. Her prose collection Vow To Poetry, subtitled Essays, Interviews, & Manifestos, is a manifesto in itself, defining her commitment to poetry, while Fast Speaking Woman is a magnificent declaration of intent in poetry form (see a video clip of Anne fast speaking here). Of it Anne says:
I wanted to assert the sense of my mind, my imagination being able to travel as artist, maker, inventor. To see beyond boundaries.
A manifesto contains passion and drive and purpose, all wrapped up in the efficiency of a list (something I explored in another writing experiment, Lists, Lovely Lists).
Start looking, and you find manifestos in many places:
* This Critic’s Manifesto by Daniel Mendelsohn is as much an exploration-essay, but it amounts to a powerful distillation of the writer’s experiences, commitments, and desires in writing.
* David Shields’s Reality Hunger (subtitled A Manifesto) is a fantastic book-length cry for new forms in writing.
I do admit to finding some manifestos opaque, dull, or pompous, especially (sorry!) some of those by poets and self-described experimental writers and artists, and particularly (double sorry!) a lot of those by self-described experimental poets. I guess laying out your intent like that can open yourself to excess, abstraction, and cliché. It’s something to be mindful of, and to avoid or maybe to write with awareness of, writing through and out the other side until your writing is tangible and fresh again. But, too, I guess a bit of pomp is fair game when you’re giving free rein to your intent – and writers really should allow themselves this, unhindered, from time to time.
I also find that a manifesto is a useful tool during revision. It can be a super tool for clarifying where you are during your drafting, and I often ask writers I’m working with to write a manifesto – it helps me to understand what they are looking for, but more than that it often helps writers take stock, frequently at a point where they’re drifting or losing focus or getting stuck. Sometimes our intent shifts as a project evolves, and we need to keep tabs on that too.
Writing – and later referring back to and updating – a manifesto can also be a powerful way to restore flagging confidence at moments of doubt, or when you are shirking the task of fully owning your project.
So: for this week’s writing experiment, write yourself a manifesto. It could be a mission statement outlining your long-term intent as a writer, or it could be a five-year plan, or it could be a manifesto for a specific piece of writing, perhaps as part of your revision. It might be specific to a genre you’re working in. It could involve artistic and aesthetic principles as well as commercial goals, and it might (should?) also invite political consequence. Go on, be a revolutionary through your writing. Change the world. Even let yourself be pompous – this is one of those occasions where a bit of bombast will do you no harm.
Make that declaration. Set some boundaries, then see beyond them.
Okay, so I was going to stop weekly writing experiments, but in fact I had decided to do them every now and then as the whim takes me and inspiration strikes. And lo! So soon.
Dear Derrida: I waited for you behind the pillar at the Rijksmuseum in 1988. Do you recall? We drank cocoa in the cafe. You showed me how to breathe. I was wearing a lambs wool jumper. You were wearing a mauve silk shirt unbuttoned to your mid chest. Though it was cold. It was winter. I break up with how much I longed for you at that time of my life. I break up with the desire to be seen. Hey. Are you reading this? Death: a letterbox. You are so beautiful. I sank to my knees. I am sorry I did not understand your poetry at the time and judged it so harshly. Goodbye for now. Goodbye forever. Love: you know who I am.
I reckon that break-up letters are great for writing. You tap into something profound. You latch on to details, and then latch the writing on to those details. Your voice is powerful and direct in its address. Your writing is laden with purpose. Go for it!
For this week’s writing experiment: Write a break-up letter. True, fictional, personal, political (Scotland didn’t write one after all yesterday).
(The writing of this post is not responsible for any ensuing divorces. It is amazing what can surface in writing experiments.)
(And additional thanks to Ella Longpre, who once gave me a brass heart, which afterwards I realised made me the Tin Man. If I only had a heart … And he had one all along.)
(PS I should stop judging poetry I don’t understand so harshly too.)
This is going to be the last Friday Writing Experiment, as such. I’ve had various interruptions of late – a dog, a garden, other work – and my regular posts became irregular, but I’ve been thinking for a while that I’d draw things to an end when I reached a year’s worth of weekly writing exercises. And here we are, on the fifty-second. I might add others, perhaps in the contexts of different types of posts, and there is a list of all the other exercises elsewhere on this site (this will be updated). I shall continue to make posts about writing and publishing on this blog, but maybe they’ll take other forms, such as reviews of resources for writers, or craft essays. I’d like to say that would be weekly, but right now I can’t commit.
For this last writing experiment, though, I want to return to one of my (our) first influences in reading and writing, and also one of my first experiences of being a student in a writing workshop – in fact, this draws inspiration from the very first exercise in the very first week of my very first Summer Writing Program, back in a hot summer in Colorado in 2002.
It was a workshop on fairy tales, led by the very brilliant and very inspiring Rebecca Brown. Are there any literary forms more fun, more magical, more sparking of the imagination than fairy tales? We read and talked and wrote, and read and talked and wrote some more. We discussed the elements and structures of fairy tales: heroes and villains, and magic objects, and patterns of three (three wishes, three sisters, three little pigs).
We also talked about our own favourites, which is always so inspiring. It doesn’t matter if it’s Grimm or Disney; the Disney versions are the ones I grew up with most of all (had a fantastic bumper book of Disney stories largely based on fairy tales), and I don’t buy the idea they are sanitised (plenty of them had moments that scared the hell out of me as a kid), and at least back then they had yet to be commercialised the hell out of, or overanalysed by dry little sticks with PhDs.
And of course there are plenty of other types of reworkings, whether it’s Angela Carter’s ‘The Werewolf’ or one of Anne Sexton’s Transformations or The Glass Casket, the richly imaginative reblending of one of the Grimm Brothers’ tales published this year by my friend and Naropa peer McCormick Templeman.
But back to that workshop in 2002: we did lots of writing within the short span of a week. We retold fairy tales, we composed fairy tales of our own making, and then I had most fun of all with the exercise where we rewrote our own life histories in the terms of a fairy tale (I in fact read this at my first public reading).
It’s below. It was one of those pieces that came out pretty much just right, and it’s copied here with barely any editing since. Sometimes those unfiltered pieces come straight from the heart, and have a voice and a directness that shouldn’t be toyed with. This was another time and place, of course! Written from that time when I lived in the US as a student. And it’s selective of places and players and particular episodes, of certain love affairs. So, please, be forgiving …
It’s not hard to translate the people and places in your own life into the archetypes of a fairy tale: mean aunts become wicked witches, the love of your life a handsome prince or a beautiful princess, a career change a shapeshifting transformation.
So, for this week’s writing experiment: write a version of your own. Recast events of your own life into a fairy tale.
Happily Ever After
Once upon a time a little boy lived on a far northern isle of rolling hills and forests of oak. The little boy led a charmed childhood, gathering blackberries from brambly hedgerows and sailing paper boats in slowly treading rivers. Best of all he loved to read books, and he especially loved books in which people lived Happily Ever After. Many of these books were set in a Magic Kingdom across the ocean in the Realm of Dreamy Dreamers. The little boy believed he too would live Happily Ever After if he lived in that Magic Kingdom, whose king was a mouse with a permanent smile.
The little boy had a younger sister, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, many cousins, even a great-great-grandmother, but enough of them for now; they have their own stories, for another time. The little boy’s mother was a good seamstress: remember the mother. The little boy’s father was a good gamekeeper but a bad husband who abandoned his wife for an older woman who lived down a coal mine. Then he was a bad husband all over again when he abandoned his second wife for a much younger woman, who lived down a different coal mine. Then he abandoned his third wife for her even younger sister, who lived down the very same coal mine. The little boy was lucky, as he never had to live with any of his three wicked stepmothers. He never even met them, but his mother assured him they were wicked. They have their own sorry stories, which we can hear another day. The little boy was simply happy that his mother and father were no longer fighting all the time. He could read his books in peace now.
So, the mother was a good seamstress, and she was a good mother, but she was poor too, and the bad husband never sent her any money. The bad husband, however, had a father who was a High Priest in the Church of Many Prohibitions. And it came to pass that the High Priest had to visit the Realm of Dreamy Dreamers on a mission to spread the good word of Many Prohibitions, and he brought the little boy with him. And together they visited the Magic Kingdom, where a sleeping princess had woken from a dark spell, and where little boys never grew up. They danced with the mouse with the permanent smile, and a quarrelsome duck with a freakishly large head.
But magic of this illusory kind never lasts forever. The High Priest continued on his trip to the Realm of Dreamy Dreamers, and brought his grandson to the Gathering of the Missionaries of Many Prohibitions. The little boy discovered that the Church of Many Prohibitions outlawed the eating of shellfish and the practice of sodomy. He never liked to eat shellfish, anyway, and at that time he hadn’t the foggiest idea what the practice of sodomy could be. While the missionaries frothed and foamed and rolled around in their rules and regulations, he sat in a corner and read books about the Magic Kingdom. Maybe, one fine day, he could return and live Happily Ever After with the mouse with the permanent smile?
Despite his activities in the Church of Many Prohibitions, the grandfather was a kind grandfather, and before they returned to the far northern isle he took his grandson to visit many other wonders of the Realm of Dreamy Dreamers: a grand canyon hewn from orange rock, an immense waterfall carved into a horseshoe, a giant city of towering steel and glass. The little boy came to understand that magic could take many forms, that Happily Ever After resides in many different locations, and not just the Magic Kingdom where the mouse was king.
The little boy and his grandfather returned to the far northern isle. Years passed. The boy continued to read books, and when the time came to attend the Academy of Specialist Knowledge he focused his studies on the many marvels of the Realm of Dreamy Dreamers. He still loved the tales of the Magic Kingdom, but he came to understand the wider history and many great artforms of this fresh green breast of a new world: the adventures to be found on the roads of its rich and varied lands, the great discoveries of the best minds of its many generations. And he learned that the people of the Realm of Dreamy Dreamers were unique in the history of the world, for they had a collective contract with their leaders that guaranteed each and every one of them not only Life and Liberty, but the Pursuit of Happiness. The intangible glories of Happily Ever After made into an inalienable right. Dreamy Dreamers indeed.
And, for a while, the little boy returned to study in a small and modest corner of the Realm of Dreamy Dreamers called the Land of Enchantment, a desert kingdom of captivating sunsets and cities in the sky, where he lived happily. But not yet Happily Ever After.
For the little boy was now a man, and he had come to understand that Happily Ever After resides not in a place but in a state of body and mind. And though he still did not like shellfish – he was vegetarian, after all! – he now knew, and liked, the practice of sodomy. Loved it, in fact. So when he once again returned to the far northern isle he knew that the good word of the Church of Many Prohibitions was in fact, for him, a bad word. A very bad word.
And then the little boy – now a man – met a tall, handsome, dark-haired prince. That’s a tale for another time, but, for now, let’s just say they lived and ate and travelled together, and together they explored the healthy and hearty joys of sodomy, and their love for the Realm of Dreamy Dreamers.
For now they live in – of all places – the Realm of Dreamy Dreamers, in its western Land of Rocky Mountains. The little boy – now a man – is finding new Pursuits of Happiness, at an Academy of Mind, Body and Spirit, where a High Priestess of No Prohibitions But Many, Many Scarves holds a summer festival of poetry and storytelling. The little boy – now a man – is discovering that Happily Ever After is, for him, an ongoing journey into the world of books and the imagination. And sodomy and a dark-haired prince.
And lest we forget his mother, the seamstress, who is a quiet and unassuming woman, hence her minor role in this particular tale: she is coming to visit in October. Who knows, she too may find magic and happiness in the Realm of Dreamy Dreamers.
