The Writing Space

"That's my spot." ~ Sheldon, The Big Bang Theory

A recurring theme and a vital topic is that of a writing space, a place a writer feels comfortable and unencumbered enough to put black on white and practice their craft.  I lack this and so it has been a topic of much interest to me as of late.  In reading Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones and Wood's The Pocket Muse I encountered very similar ideas about what a writing space should be.  It should be a place that inspires you, that represents and augments who you are, that is orderly to a point but not pristine because immaculate conditions rarely produce art, and it should be yours.  Claim it with a name plate if you have to, this desk, corner of the kitchen table, spot on the couch, nook in the hallway is yours and yours alone.  I am considering making a space in the garage, but for now my 'writing space' consists of wherever the hell I can get a moment's peace and, of course, the library.  

Thanks to a good friend, I now possess a copy of On Writing by Stephen King and while I have yet to start reading the meat of the book, I noticed that even there, on the back cover, King makes mention of the all important writing space.  His assessment was that it should be a corner desk thereby sheltering one from the constant distractions of the world and allowing concentration and completion.  

Something interesting about the concept of having a writing space that is yours and yours alone is the necessity of leaving it.  Goldberg suggests finding a cafe to write in while Wood tells us that it's important to mix up the schedule a bit and try writing at a different place (park bench perhaps), a different time of the day (if you usually write at night, try getting up with the sun and see what happens), and also to write in a different style from time to time.  I understand that the real function of all of this is to rouse us out of our comfort zones and gain new perspective, new ideas, and perhaps reach a new audience.  But one must have a comfort zone in order to leave it, hence the importance of the writing space.  Do you have a writing space?  What is it like? 

Amanda LaFantasie (Skoora) © 2012

Procrastinating is the thing

Yep...that's what I'm up to this week

Focus-- It has been difficult to focus these last couple of weeks. Be it unstable family issues, a trip to a library that resulted in borrowing more books then necessary, or changes at work that is leaving us a person down for the last two months and will continue until at least mid-October. In short, I have had other things on my mind. AND it doesn't help that any time I sit down to write I end up making a to-do list and brainstorming for the blog. Not to say that the research or blogs or other websites, school programs, and ear tagging other authors, editors, agencies, and trying like crazy to think of a discussion question for the facebook forum aren't important. Maybe at this point less is more. Maybe I need to take a step back instead of throwing myself completely into this writing world.

I've been thinking on my novel-- less thinking and more writing is needed. I've started questioning the pacing-- perhaps starting in another place and lengthening the time between the scenes I already have written down. Maybe I should write it slower, having scenes that introduce the politics of the world. The worse part is that I still don't know what happens after I get all my characters in one spot, let alone what the ending should be. I'm even questioning if I should write a fantasy novel since I haven't read the genre in awhile.

Maybe putting aside the creative writing is my next step. Maybe I'm at the gathering stage where random prompts are key and not trying to write anything more. Yet writing on random prompts really is the only thing I've written on in six years (minus two NaNoWriMo attempts). And frankly I'm tired of that state; I want to finish and craft something.



so this is the small goal for my week- set up writing nights two times a week. This will make me focus on just the creative writing.

Natalie Goldberg's advice on giving yourself a nudge on your writing.

…I will tell you a few tricks I have done in the past to nudge me along:

1. I haven’t written anything in a while. I call a writing friend and make a date with her to meet in a week and go over our work. I have to write something to show her.

2. I teach writing groups and have to do the assignments I give the class. I didn’t wait for years of writing before I began to teach writing. I was living in Taos, and there were few writers there ten years ago. I needed writing friends, so I began women’s writing group. In teaching them, I learned to write. Baba Hari Dass, an Indian yogi, says: “Teach in order to learn.”

3. I’ll wake up in the morning and say, “Okay, Natalie, you have until ten A.M. to do whatever you want. At ten you must have your hand on the pen.” I give myself some space and an outside limit.

4. I wake up in the morning, and without thinking, washing, talking to anyone, I go right to my desk and begin writing.

5. These past two months I have been teaching all day, five days a week. I come home very tired and resistant to writing. There is a wonderful croissant place three blocks from my house that makes the best homemade chocolate-chip cookies for thirty cents. They also let you sit there and write forever. About an hour after I am home from work I say to myself,“Okay, Natalie, if you go to the Croissant Express and write for an hour, you can have two chocolates.” I am usually out the door within fifteen minutes since chocolate is one of my driving forces. One problem: On Friday I had the nerve to have four cookies instead of my quota of two, but anything to get me writing. Usually, once I’m in the midst of actually writing, it’s its own greatest reward.

6. I try to fill a notebook a month. There’s no quota on quality, just quantity—a full notebook, no matter what garbage I write. If it is the 25^th of the month and I have only filled five pages and there are seventy more to fill by the end of the month, I have a lot of writing ahead of me in the next five days.

Excerpt from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down The Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down The Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston: Shambhala, 1986

Random Syntax prompt from Natalie Goldberg

Try this. Take one of your most boring pieces of writing and choose from three or four consecutive lines or sentences and write them at the top of a blank piece of paper.

Okay. See each one of those words simply as wooden blocks, all the same size and color. No noun or verb has any more value than the, a, and. Everything is equal. Now for about a third of a page scramble them up as though you were just moving wooden blocks around. Don’t try to make any sense of what you write down. Your mind will keep trying to construct something. Hold back that urge, relax, and mindlessly write down the words. You will have to repeat words to fill a third of a page.

Now if you would like, arbitrarily put in a few periods, a question mark, maybe an exclamation mark, colons, or semicolons. Do all of this without thinking, without trying to make any sense. Just for fun.

Now read it aloud as though it were saying something. Your voice should have inflection and expression. You might try reading it in an angry voice, an exuberant, sad, whining, petulant, or demanding voice, to help you get into it.

Excerpt from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down The Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down The Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston: Shambhala, 1986

What are your deep dreams? prompt by Natalie Goldberg



Deep Dream painted by Javier Martinez

I asked my Sunday-night group (many of whom had been doing practice writing for three years), “Where do you want to go with writing? You have this strong creative voice; you’ve been able to separate out the creator and editor. What do you want to do with it?”



There comes a time to shape and direct the force we have learned. I asked them, “What are your deep dreams? Write for five minutes.” Many of us don’t know, don’t recognize, avoid our deep dreams. When we write for five, ten minutes we are forced to put down wishes that float around in our mind and that we might not pay attention to. It is an opportunity to write down, without thinking, wishes at the periphery of our perceptions.

Reread them. Start to take your dreams and writers seriously. If you’re not sure, if you honestly don’t know what you want to do, start wishing for a direction, for your way to appear.

Excerpt from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down The Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down The Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston: Shambhala, 1986



A Writer's Best Friend

They say that total immersion is the best way to learn a language and what is writing but the purest expression of any language?  If a writer truly wishes to hone their craft, then what better way to learn the craft than by immersing themselves in the black and white of text on paper?  Libraries are a writer's best friend.  There is something magical about writing in a library.  Before the internet, before search engines, before Q&A sites and major online information hubs, there was the library and that is where a writer would go to learn what kind of weapon their character might use, to learn the laws that their bad guy might break, to learn of the clothing worn in Victorian England, and to find inspiration on every shelf.  Lately, my cohort and I have been frequenting our local library not only to borrow books, movies, and music, but also to get some writing done.  Surrounded by thousands upon thousands of novels, periodicals, picture books, and reference materials I was finally able to clear my head and concentrate enough to write out the entire outline of my grad school admittance essay.  It is a few drafts of polishing away from ready.  

The best part of writing in a library is that you are never short of information or inspiration whether your aim be nonfiction, fiction, poetry, or research paper.  There is joy in wandering the aisles and taking in the sheer magnitude of words and lives behind those words.  And if you have an idea of what you're looking for, you can seek inspiration in a more direct way.  If your character is a fly fisherman, Mr. Dewey Decimal can help you find detailed books on the subject.  If your character reads nothing but Agatha Christie, you might browse the mystery section and put yourself in your character's shoes as you gaze upon the myriad of Marples and Poirots lining the shelves.  I browsed the catalog today in hopes of finding inspiration directly relating to the craft of writing and found a variety of books, some of which came home with me.  These look incredibly promising for anyone writing mystery, murder or mayhem: 

Cause of Death 

Deadly Doses 

These are the ones I ended up borrowing today.  So far I am extremely impressed and inspired by 'The Pocket Muse.'  I will be sharing some of the ideas contained within this book but I recommend everyone take a gander at it for themselves.  Dani has shared a variety of information and prompts from Natalie Goldberg's book, 'Writing Down the Bones,' and I have been so impressed and excited by what I've seen that I couldn't leave it there on the shelf once I found it.

The Pocket Muse 

Writing Down the Bones 

Writing Mysteries

Finally I would like to propose a challenge.  I challenge you (contributors and readers) to spend some time this week in a library.  Perhaps you have some time set aside specifically for writing. Why not spend that time in place where authors are immortalized, remembered, and born?  Even if you don't go there to write, take a stroll through your public library and just see what kind of treasures you stumble upon.

Amanda LaFantasie (Skoora) © 2012

Obsession List prompt from Natalie Goldberg

 

 

Every once in a while I make a list of my obsessions. Some obsessions change and there are always more. Some are thankfully forgotten.

Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.

I have my writing groups make lists of their obsessions so that they can see what they unconsciously (and consciously) spend their waking hours thinking about. After you write them down you can put them to good use. You have a list of things to write about.

 

Excerpt from Natalie Goldberg's Wild Writing Down The Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down The Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston: Shambhala, 1986

Write Right Now! Inspiration deck

Writing is a great journey, it is a path with the possibility of making us free. And it can do all of this while you sit at a desk.

--From Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind

Waiting to Read Write prompt from Natalie Goldberg

*Dani's notes- though I do believe in writing and not reading until later, I don't necessarily agree with Goldberg's time table. Feel free to revise this prompt so the timing works for you. write a week and go back to it a week later. Really you want to just give yourself enough time to distance yourself from your writing.*

Write every day for ten days in a row. Do not reread anything you have written for those ten days until two weeks later.

Then sit down in a comfortable chair and have a soft heart and read with interest and compassion what you have written. Underline sentences that stand out. Use those sentences as first lines for future writing practice. Put parentheses around sections you like. Develop those sections, if you want, not by reworking them but by re-entering them with more timed writing practice.

And be brave. Let some of the good writing go. Don’t worry. There’ll be lots of it over time. You can’t use all of it. Be generous and allow some of it to lie fallow. What a relief! We can write well and let it go. That’s just as good as writing poorly and letting it go. Just let go.

Excerpt from Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

Goldberg, Natalie. Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life. New York: Bantam Books, 1990

I remember prompt from Wild Mind

**Note from Dani: When I first came across this exercise, I thought it was vanilla. However, I have to admit that this is my 'go to' exercise for free writing that I have repeated many times.**

Do a timed writing for ten minutes. Begin it with “I remember” and keep going. Every time you get stuck and feel you have nothing to say, write, “I remember” again and keep going. To begin with “I remember” does not mean you have to write only about your past. Once you get going, you follow your own mind where it takes you. You can fall into one memory of your mother’s teeth for ten minutes of writing or you can list lots of short memories. The memory can be something that happened five seconds ago. When you write memory, it isn’t in the past anyway. It’s alive right now.

Okay, after the ten minutes, stop. Walk around your kitchen table or get a piece of leftover fish from last night’s dinner to nibble on, but don’t talk. Now go for another ten minutes. This time, begin with “I don’t remember” and keep going. This is good. It gets to the underbelly of your mind, the blank, dark spaces of your thoughts.

Sometimes we write along one highway of “I remember,” seat-belt ourselves in and drive. Using the negative, “I don’t remember,” allows us to make a U-turn and see how things look in the night. What are the things you don’t care to remember, have repressed, but remember underneath all the same?

Now try “I’m thinking of” for ten minutes. Then, “I’m not thinking of” for ten minutes. Write beginning with “I know,” then “I don’t know,” for ten minutes. The list is endless: “I am, I’m not”; “I want, I don’t want”; “I feel, I don’t feel.”

I use these for warm-ups. It stretches my mind in positive and negative directions, in obvious and hidden places, in the conscious and the unconscious. It also is a chance to survey my mind and limber me up before I direct my thoughts to whatever I am working on.

Excerpt from Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

Goldberg, Natalie. Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life. New York: Bantam Books, 1990

Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg--if you have ever picked up a 'how to write' book, you have come across this name millions of times. Natalie Goldberg is one of the top gurus for workshops, crafting writing, and everything else that is part of the creative generating process.

When I attended Deb McLeod's Novel Boot Camp Seminar a few weeks ago, I learned that Natalie Goldberg is actually the founder of free writing (the activity of placing pen to paper for a solid time limit without worry of logic or grammar). Also, I learned that clustering (or webbing) came out around the same time in the 80's. Oddly enough, it never occurred to me that these techniques wouldn't have existed before-- that someone, some generation, had to come up with these ideas.

In any case, the next few weeks of prompts will be coming from Natalie Goldberg's  Wild Mind: Living the Writer's  Life and Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within.