Interview: The Four Elements of Creativity

by Andrew

Kellie Jackson from Words Away interviewed me for her blog (10 September 2017) in advance of the Everyday Magic workshop we ran in November 2017.

Kellie: Is this workshop suitable for a beginner or of more benefit to a more advanced or published writer?

Andrew: Anyone interested in writing – or any artistic practice. I strongly feel that true artists are eternal learners, constantly evolving and keeping their work fresh.

Kellie: As a writer I’m often trying to achieve a goal or outcome; be it a short story for a deadline or a novel to submit to a prospective agent. Why might I give time to putting outcome aside and focus on creativity?

Andrew: I sometimes observe a certain grasping quality among unpublished writers. Part of my job is of course to help writers understand how to make their work more publishable, and that involves practical matters in exploring the writer’s craft. And a tangible goal is usually important: a finished story, or getting published, or just developing your voice. But a focus on outcomes can sometimes get in the way of making the most of the fresh, moment-by-moment experience of writing. Those neuroses creep in. I often see writers tense up, worrying about what an agent might think, or anxious about getting things ‘wrong’.

Any craft requires discipline and rigour, but the idea of right and wrong can be inhibiting in the arts. So it can help to trick the mind and put these concerns to one side, at least for a while (and not least because worries about agents’ opinions are usually jumping the gun).

Kellie: What can a writer do to put these concerns to one side?

Andrew: Relax. Surprise yourself. Let your subconscious do some of the work. Experiment, and give yourself the freedom to fail from time to time, because you will learn something from your mistakes. In fact: what is failure, if you have gained something from it?

And failure (also known as experimenting) is an essential part of drafting. Embrace failure! Aim to fail somewhere along the way, and see what comes up and what you learn from it. I am convinced that what arises will in fact help in getting you towards that goal of being published too.

Kellie: Why have you focused on the four elements for this workshop?

Andrew: Even if we are freeing ourselves up, a framework helps. I started off thinking about the difference between the right brain (loosely associated with creativity and intuition) and the left brain (associated with structure and the rational mind).

But I also resist binary thinking and either/or – the world is always more complex than that. I had grown interested in tarot, and particularly its use of symbols and archetypes as they relate to storytelling (its fortune-telling aspects don’t appeal so much).

The four suits in tarot are related to the four elements of Fire (energy), Water (feeling), Earth (the material realm) and Air (the world of the mind). The four elements are also found in classical philosophy and astrology, and present themselves in other ways in many contexts. Jungian psychology describes four functions: intuiting, feeling, sensing, and thinking. Myers-Briggs personality tests, often used in professional training, draw on aspects of the four elements too.

Kellie: Are four elements enough to work with?

Andrew: Some traditions have five elements. Indian philosophy gives us seven chakras. I like the balance of four, and the symbolic powers represented by the elements are easily understood in the context of writing. I began to see how working symbolically with the four elements can help to deepen writing and make it more engaging.

Kellie: How will this be applied in the workshop environment?

Andrew: In a Four Elements workshop, we read or listen to samples of writing, and then we discuss how the four elements come to life in them. Water, for example, represents feeling, so we identify ways in which the workings of tone carry emotion to the reader. And then we put this into practice with some exercises as well as short meditations. I usually give suggestions for writing experiments to try at home too.

Kellie: Have you given a workshop like this previously and how did you develop the idea?

Andrew: In my work as an editor and book doctor, I often come across writing that seems overthought, cluttered, or trying too hard – it feels neurotic. It can be flat, and fail to engage – it lacks mood or emotion. Then I meet the writers of these manuscripts, and they describe their work in conversation with more passion, eloquence and ease than they achieve in the writing; I often find myself saying: ‘Write that down! Bottle it – that energy belongs somewhere in your book.’

I also feel that many conversations about writing are over-intellectualised. It certainly helps to understand concepts from literary criticism, but theory can also contribute to the clutter that gets in the way of clear expression. This is material that should be understood deeply but practised lightly.

As a teacher I thought about a framework in which we can develop more intuitive or holistic approaches to writing while still paying attention to important practical matters of craft such as voice and characterisation. I was looking for ways for us to learn – or rediscover – how to restore such natural qualities to our writing.

Kellie: When you first described this workshop, I wondered if it might be too experimental or hippied-out for my taste.  What would you say to someone who’s interested in creativity but worried that this workshop might be too out-there?

Andrew: Loosen up! Embrace your inner hippie. I’m serious: don’t take yourself too seriously. Invite a little of the wild in, and relax into your best self.

But you can still take your writing seriously. If you are not a hippie or an experimental type, I’d suggest that it’s good to embrace a different style, even if just for a while. Just as conventional writing can gain from trying more experimental approaches, experimental writing gains from understanding the conventions.

And again, I question the binary of conventional vs experimental. I think all projects of the imagination draw on both convention and experimentation. Writers and artists must be open and alert to all possibilities.

Kellie: Last question. How can we develop our intuition as a writer (or editor) and in what way might this feed our creative life?

Andrew: Read widely and deeply. Read beyond your usual taste or genres. Listen to audiobooks, especially of favourite books you’ve read already – listening is an embodying experience that burrows deep. Read interviews with your favourite writers (try the Paris Review ones or run a search on YouTube). Write regularly – every day if you can. Be open to experiment. Do other things that stimulate you, particularly in non-verbal ways: gardening, yoga, walking the dog, cooking, photography, swimming.

And most of all: have fun! The teachers who’ve influenced me most have been the ones who create most fun in the classroom. From Naropa University’s Kerouac School, where I studied and later taught, I particularly think about Bobbie Louise Hawkins, who stresses the importance of the natural speaking voice, and Jack Collom, who frequently used poems written by children as inspirations. And then there’s Natalie Goldberg, who also studied at Naropa in the early days and whose Zen-inflected teachings are always playful and lively; you just want to be in the same room as her, even if it’s on Zoom. I also greatly admire the teaching philosophy of Lynda Barry, with its emphasis on play, and Ray Bradbury, who says that the things that you do should be things that you love, and that things that you love should be things that you do. Having fun is the best nourishment, and the best way to avoid the trap of self-consciousness.

Updated July 2023. You can read more about the Four Elements practice in this post as well.

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Festival of Writing 2017

by Andrew | 6 Comments

The 2017 Festival of Writing in York was great fun – it’s always lovely to end the summer seeing old friends and meeting new ones. I’ve already posted my I Remember for the weekend. I was only sorry that timings meant I missed Sam Jordison’s industry panel, as I really love the work of Galley Beggar Press. But overall I had a (slightly) easier schedule this year, too, which meant I felt less rushed and had more energy and felt more relaxed. Thanks to everyone at the Writers’ Workshop for once again inviting me.

Here are a few notes and links following up from workshops and talking to writers.

BOOK DOCTOR SESSIONS
The book doctor sessions were probably the highlight, as I love nothing more than that one-on-one interaction of working with writers, saying what is working well and asking questions that invite them to dig deeper, often into unexpected places. Sometimes I sense that writers aren’t confident about where to take their work, and an outside prod is what’s needed. I am a prodder.

In terms of craft, I often found myself asking for more MOOD or EDGE in the writing (often a matter of working on VOICE, PACE, or TENSION), or a clearer FOCUS on EXTERNAL ACTION: every chapter, every page, every paragraph should have a gift for the readers, and many of those gifts will involve changes in the outside world that actively move the story forward. We also have to make allowances for giving the reader a breather, of course, e.g., fantasy novels may indulge in a fat paragraph of description here or there, if they bring that world to life.

Here is a link to an older blog post on getting feedback on your work.

WORKSHOPS
My workshops followed a sequence, I realised, from the bigger picture of story (plotting) to the craft of telling a story (showing and telling) to the nuts and bolts of voice and style (nouns and verbs).

Plotting mini-course
Story is what it’s all about for me, and plotting is what makes stories come alive.

I really enjoyed leading this longer version of a workshop I first did at this year’s Getting Published Day, though it was a bigger room and a slightly larger group and I wasn’t really able to find out what everyone was working on this year.

The biggest take from this class, I feel: the active engagement of plot as a verb rather than a noun, which is why I prefer to think about plotting rather than plot. One of my favourite plots comes from Fingersmith, whose scheming characters use or are described with variations of the word plot 37 times. Let your characters plot, and let their plottings arise from their yearnings.

We looked at: character as the heart of plotting and your stories; structure and time; conventions and types of story; and outlining and drafting as a means of extracting symbol and theme. Along the way we discussed why change is probably a more important driver for story than conflict, and how Dolores Umbridge in her pink jacket and Cersei Lannister in her Shame! Shame! Shame! are more engaging antagonists than Voldemort and the Night King.

To create some rising action of our own through the push and pull of hope and despair, we did a Fortunately/Unfortunately exercise as a pass-around. I wish we’d had chairs in a big circle so our creative collaborations could logistically have been a bit easier! But I was impressed how some mini epics were cooked out of the given constraints (a genre; a positive or negative change; continuing what someone else had written).

I also suggested a number of exercises for people to try at home, as well as prompts for reflection in their writing journals (you do keep one, don’t you?!).

There are a lot of books on structure and plot, and some that shall remain unnamed are rather, um, mansplainy. You have to know this stuff, but I find they often overegg things.

Here are the ones I like, along with other relevant links from our discussion, as well as a few extras I couldn’t shoehorn in:

* Stephen King, On Writing (I just got the audio version, read by the man himself – fab)

* Francine Prose, Reading Like A Writer

* Albert Zuckerman, Writing the Blockbuster Novel

* Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

* Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me

* Ronald Tobias, 20 Master Plots – for a checklist of the 20 plots, follow the link here

* University of British Columbia/edX, How To Write A Novel – an excellent course I reviewed here

* Michael Hauge, ‘The Five Key Turning Points Of All Successful Screenplays’

* The site of Christopher Vogler, author of The Writer’s Journey (follow the link Hero’s Journey on the left-hand side), plus Vogler on YouTube talking about the Hero’s Journey and discussing it using the example of The Matrix

* What makes a hero? from TedEd – as well as watching the film, be sure to check out further resources under Dig Deeper

* Sophie Hannah, Top Ten Twists in Fiction

* And for taking some of your work deeper: Friday Writing Experiment: Word Power

Showing & Telling & Storytelling
We deconstructed the creative writing myth Show Don’t Tell, making a case for storytelling and a narrator, and using an Ernest Hemingway short story and the opening of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain to identify some of the techniques that help create the mood necessary for emotional engagement with a story. Here are some links to posts I mentioned:

* Tell Me A Story (my own blog)

* A Book Is Not A Film (my own blog)

* Psychic Distance: What It Is And How To Use It (from Emma Darwin’s blog)

* The Ultimate Description Toolkit (some excellent tools to help with showing from Angela Ackerman)

* Is ‘Show Don’t Tell’ A Universal Truth Or A Colonial Relic?

Nouns & Verbs
The simple message of this workshop is: choose the best subjects for your sentences, and then choose the best verbs to power what they do, and probably pick as few verbs as you can get away with, else they’ll be cluttering or confusing your writing.

Also: be specific when necessary, but you can sometimes leave something to the reader’s imagination.

And: adverbs and adjectives are fine – but as Ursula Le Guin says, they add fat, and stories need muscle. I mentioned Nabokov’s Favourite Word Is Mauve, by Ben Blatt, whose statistical survey of classic and bestselling books does in fact prove that what are commonly regarded as the best books have the fewest adverbs.

Adverbs and adjectives tell. Nouns and verbs show. What balance is required for your writing?

Recommended resources:

*  Nuts and Bolts: ‘Thought’ Verbs, from Chuck Paluhniak

* Anyone who wants a lively and informative guide to grammar could take a look at Constance Hale’s brilliant Sin and Syntax.

* And Steering the Craft contains much crisp advice and wisdom from Ursula Le Guin, as well as plenty of exercises. Really, you have to try all this out by putting some of it into practice.

AND COMING SOON …
The workshops I ran at York this year were craft-based, with a bit of motivational pep talk in the delivery, I hope.

If you’re interested in something a little different, and are available and close to London, on Saturday 18 November I’m leading a one-day workshop on creativity in collaboration with Kellie Jackson, who runs the Words Away salon series. You can read a little more about my inspirations for this workshop in this interview with Kellie.

I Remember York 2017

by Andrew | 1 Comment

I didn’t use I Remember exercises at York this year, but in that style here are a few quick memories from this weekend’s Festival of Writing in York:

*

I remember sirens from Australia, cooks in Paris, immigrants from Uganda.

I remember mothers: Sicilian and surrogate and Geordie and grieving.

I remember killers from Yorkshire (and Merseyside, and Edinburgh, and France, and Wales, and Northumberland, and Yorkshire again).

I remember YA dystopian novels.

I remember an ADULT dystopian novel.

I remember saying I’d love to read a blockbuster novel about Polish-British immigrants.

I remember an agent getting excited about badgers.

I remember having a Norma Desmond moment.

I remember Facing the Fear, and the Fuck-It Draft.

I remember being woken at 4am by a scream. Was it (a) a murderous clown, or (b) a goose?

The following night, I remember wondering whether (c) that scream had in fact come from the room next to mine …

I remember hearing about an unimaginative agent.

I remember a writer who was far too polite to say who this was.

I remember politeness being rewarded: an encouraging encounter with an imaginative publisher.

I remember it takes all sorts, and if at first, and never take the first answer.

I remember Ruby winning the best first chapter contest with a brilliant pitch that was too good not to win.

I remember first meeting Ruby in 2012.

I remember persistence.

I remember Deborah talking about being big in Japan (and sixteen other territories).

I remember someone nobbling me for saying that Sauron is a crap antagonist (Gollum is a brilliant one, honest).

I remember Tor saying the most amazing thing about being published is connecting with readers. ‘Every time someone reads my characters, they become more real.’

I remember Harry coming to sit at our table at the gala dinner,

I remember Harry starting to tell a story about publishing, and turning to a delegate sitting next to him.

I remember Harry saying to that delegate, ‘Do you know Antonia Hodgson?’

I remember that delegate saying, ‘Yes, she’s my sister.’

I remember meeting many old friends and making many new.

I remember the train back, filling in Shelley’s morphological grid, peering into the rain.

I remember coming home to a beautiful new bathroom. I couldn’t forget that.

*

And here is another post with links and other resources mentioned in workshops and during book doctor sessions.

Jack Collom, Force of Nature

by Andrew | 4 Comments

Jack Collom, poet, teacher, friend and lover of nature, died last month. His memorial is held at Naropa today, and I’m sorry not to be there in person. I am sure many will be in attendance, and also there in spirit. Jack was a much loved and profoundly good teacher, one of the best I ever had, and his influence is felt far and wide and with great affection.

My first experience of teaching in fact came when I took Jack’s Project Outreach class at Naropa in the fall of 2002. I volunteered one morning a week in a Language Arts class at Fairview High School (which was every bit the archetype of the American school that I hoped it would be). Then every Friday at 4p.m. our Outreach class would reconvene in one of the Upaya classrooms and compare notes from the week, listen to Jack’s guidance, and do some writing exercises of our own. And with Jack, there were always tons of writing exercises: acrostics, sestinas, recipe poems, odes, Q&A poems, I Remembers, pass-arounds – lots of pass-arounds.

One form I was introduced to was the haiku-like lune. The variant the Collom lune is even named for Jack. Counting words rather than syllables suits makes this poetic form more robust and suitable than the haiku itself for the English language, I reckon. Like many good things, it was an accidental (but naturally arising) invention; Jack had no embarrassment in describing how he had misremembered the form as a verse of 3-5-3 words rather than syllables.

Over two weekends I also took the weekend practicum Designing A Writing Workshop that Jack co-taught with Lee Christopher. It offered tons of practical advice as well as some of the most fun I ever had in a classroom. We did lots more writing exercises too. The lack of self-consciousness that Jack fostered among writers was shown in his classes when, in response to the prompt ‘How I Write’, I penned a day-in-the-life poem about my tendency towards procrastination, which included rather Too Much Information about certain activities other than writing. And it must have been a classroom wholly lacking in self-consciousness that Jack fostered, because I then read this TMI piece out loud. And then, once I’d read it, I blushed, and laughed a lot with everyone else. I laugh again as I remember this, and think that doing what comes naturally and what feels like fun is so often (always?) a requisite of the best writing.

It is ironic that we often need to learn how to do what comes naturally, though. Fostering an instinctive approach to writing (and learning in general) was at the heart of Jack’s teachings. He worked a great deal in the school system, especially with the Poets in the Schools programme, and he often shared his particular joy at writing poetry with elementary schoolchildren.

Poetry Everywhere, the book on teaching poetry Jack co-wrote with Sheryl Noethe, is one of the richest resources a teacher might have. Among the hundreds of poems it uses as examples, poems by William Carlos Williams and Pablo Neruda sit beside poems by first grader Lacy Wiley and twelfth grader Ann Jankowski and many of the thousands of other students whose work Jack published in class anthologies at the end of every semester.

Such an honouring of children’s voices is not only an exercise in democracy in the classroom, but a reminder that writers often need to rediscover things we have lost: our true natures. In On Sound and Rhthym, an essay that shines brilliantly not only on the teaching of poetry but on the whole idea of learning, Jack describes how children:

have the potential for art right on the tips of their tongues. It is important that we recognize this “little genius” for poetry that children have—and not try to “muscle” them into adult standards of poetic discourse. Yes, they should develop mature language skills—but gradually, organically, while as much as possible maintaining (and developing and transforming) their own fresh poetic talents.

Good writing comes naturally. Second Nature is the title of the book of poems and essays of Jack’s that won the Colorado Book Award in 2013.

Jack taught us that an important way to develop this instinct for writing was in having fun. He sometimes taught summer workshops on comedy and writing. And his good-humoured and graceful presence in any classroom was the ultimate lesson in how to be a teacher: funny, inquiring, big-hearted, listening, patient, unafraid to challenge, praising occasionally, sharing always. And Jack always (always) joined in the writing exercises himself, scribing away at a yellow notepad with a ballpoint pen. Theories of education seem dry when set against such an example.

Keeping with that theme of nature, Jack also taught Eco-Lit, a pioneering Naropa course that was one of the first (if not the first) to focus at college level on writing about the environment and nature in such a way. The reading list amounts to an artfully curated anthology of poetry, science writing, oral history, essays, creative prose, and other forms, ranging from Stephen Jay Gould to Rachel Carson to Elizabeth Bishop to Herman Melville to Aztec poetry. I hope someone is carrying on that lineage at the Kerouac School.

Another memory: during readings of his work, Jack would indicate quoted matter by drawing bunny ears in the air with his index and middle fingers.

I don’t think Jack was a Buddhist, and (other than birdwatching?) I am not sure if he had an obvious contemplative practice. Yet he was one of the few I encountered at this Buddhist-inspired school who genuinely seemed able to put his ego to one side to get down to the work in hand. He was serious about the Big Issues in writing, but he never took himself too seriously.

Beyond his work as a union organiser, Jack did not strike me as overtly political either. Unlike many activist writers, Jack was never patronising or carping in his writing. But his poems often possess careful acts of observation, and when you are observing the truths of nature and everyday life there is little that is more political.

And how many other poets have had their hometown honour them with a specially named day, as Boulder did with Jack Collom Day in 2001?

Poet, birder, veteran, yodeller, environmentalist, father, husband, teacher: Jack Collom was a force of nature. No, is a force of nature. Because the best teachers never die. We ‘watch them grow from was to will be and will be to was’: like the Old Woods of Jack’s poem, their teachings will last.

 Poetry Everywhere by Jack Collom and Sheryl Noethe

How I Teach Poetry in the Schools by Jack Collom on poets.org

An Ecosystem of Writing Ideas by Jack Collom (every writing teacher should read this)

On Sound and Rhthym by Jack Collom

From Nature to Nurture: Ecology and Pegagogy Inform Two Long-Running Writing & Poetics Courses from Naropa University

Jack Collom (1931-2017) from the Allen Ginsberg Project  (includes video links)

Jack Collom, Boulder Poet and Educator, remembered in the Daily Camera

I Wouldn’t Be Here If It Weren’t For Jack Collom by Jonathan Montgomery

Interview with Jack Collom by Elizabeth Robinson

And my favourite poem of Jack’s (one of my favourite poems): The Old Woods

Editorial critique for #authorsforgrenfell

by Andrew | 2 Comments

I’m offering an editorial critique via the online auction Authors For Grenfell Tower. The money raised will be paid to the British Red Cross and will be going to residents affected by the Grenfell Tower fire.

I’ll read and report on up to 15,000 words plus a synopsis or proposal for your novel or work of narrative nonfiction.

More details on this specific offer here, and more info on how to bid here. Bidding is open until Tuesday 27 June, and this particular offer is available to writers worldwide.

And there are many other offers too – critiques from editors, lunches with agents, signed copies from authors, and many bookish giveaways. If you are a writer, these could be excellent opportunities. If you are a reader, you can never have enough books on your shelves, right?! And you might have chance to meet your favourite author in person too.

Bid, and bid generously – on as many bids and as much as you can afford! I can’t think of a better cause than helping people rebuild their lives. And if you’re unable to bid, perhaps circulate on social media to people who can.