ManicDDaily

Rule Number 5 – Get Out of Yourself.

Sometimes all you can think when you sit down to write is that you can’t write, you hate writing, you have nothing at all to say.

Jotting down this litany can be a legitimate way to get started.   At least, it gets your pen or fingers moving.  Pretty soon, though, it’s boring—or in the case of the variation used in The Shining – ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ – seriously creepy.  In other words, you are putting something down on the page, but you are still stuck in a rut, a rut of your own stuckness.

One way to avoid this stuckness is to try to get out of yourself, your typical grooves.  If I were more Buddhist, I would probably suggest looking around yourself, feeling your connection to the greater world.  But since I am a dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist (who likes the idea of Buddhism but is not so good at its practice), my advice is to get someone else to give you a topic (or, even better, a simple set of words.)

By “topic”, I don’t mean a paper topic, something to mull over and explicate.  I mean a writing exercise topic, something to use as a jumping off point; a stepping stone into your stream of consciousness.  But a new stepping stone, not one of the habitual ones that’s become a boulder sealing off flow.

Writing exercises are a wonderful tool for breaking down writer’s block.  They deserve their own posts, which I hope to write.   As a brief introduction here, I’ll just say that the exercises I prefer are short, sweet, and relatively low risk.  They have three basic parameters (derived again from Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down The Bones):

1.  Pick a set short time period for each exercise in advance.  Use a clock, and make yourself and your writing buddy stick to it.    (Ten minutes is a good amount to start with.  If you want to be anarchical—try seven, twelve or thirteen minutes.  Five is a bit short.)

2.  Keep your pen moving or your fingers typing throughout your set time.  (Meaning don’t stop and think about what you are going to write next, just write.)

3.   No crossing out; no back-spacing, no deletes.   (Not during your time limit.)

So back to your topic (someone else’s topic).  Choices are infinite.  It can be a single starting point:  “I remember” can be a good one, or “I don’t remember.”   Something about grandmothers often works (almost everyone has something to write about their grandmother.)

But although that kind of single topic can be interesting, you can also get stuck all over again trying to pick the “right” one.

To skip that quandary, it’s sometimes best to just use a list of 5-7 random words as “topic”.   The advantage of several words is that none has to be ideal.  The requirement is that you simply have to use the words, not actually write about them—they are not your theme (unless you want one of them to be.)

It’s best if the words are not chosen by you, or at least not by you alone.  (Choosing with a buddy is fine.)  This is because it can be very very hard to make a fresh channel through your own head.  The mind is just so tricky—it tends to cling to the old grooves, comfortable with the familiar, even the painful, tiresome familiar.  The mind is also a master of self-justification; it loves to set up situations in which it can say, ‘I told you so.’

A quick example:  let’s say that you’re stuck trying to write about your cousin’s wedding last year (or last decade) when you suddenly realized that everyone in your family thought you were too bossy, too demanding, to insecure, to ever feel loved.  You’ve tried to write the story, you may even need to write the story, but you just haven’t been able to.

So maybe you need to put it aside for a bit; warm up those fingers with something completely different.  But if you’re picking you own random words, you may still end up with “rice, veil, resentment, glare, daggers, heart, tin cans.”  Pretty soon you’re stuck all over again; you may be writing, but your subject may also be the same old thing–how lousy you feel about yourself and your family.

But if your buddy, or if you have no buddy, your friend, your child, or even your dictionary, picks the words, you might end up with things like” drill, jackhammer, whammo, smudge, chocolate cake” words that have a better chance of taking you into unexplored territory.

You may not initially feel like exploring that territory.  Let’s say you’re completely disinterested in drills, only mildly interested in chocolate cake.   Your exercise doesn’t need to be about drills; it just needs to use the word.  It can come out as metaphor: “the chords of Wagner’s wedding march were like a jackhammer, drilling into her brain.”  Or, “the icing formed a snowy veneer, but she knew that her cousin, who truly was the bossy, demanding one in the family, had insisted on a chocolate cake beneath it.”

So maybe you can’t leave your groove.  Still you can at least approach it from a different direction.  The direction may just feel like a detour but, like the classic detour, it may also help you bypass the closed lanes of your normal route and to miss all those pesky orange cones.

Please check out my picture book, 1 Mississippi, at Amazon.com.  http://www.amazon.com/1-Mississippi-Karin-Gustafson/dp/0981992307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249155338&sr=8-1