Sometimes I can physically remember what it was like, early on in my career – what it actually felt like in my body — to write in those early days. The wiring was just starting to stitch my mind to my hands to the page to the structure of a story to its characters’ inner worlds – and mainly how gawky I was. Writing as a tiptoe, then galumphing, how unsteady I was word-by-word, how much of it was an intellectual practice, so self-aware.

But even then, there were those moments when there was a tidal momentum that carried me from one word to the next and something was written without my full awareness. Those moments were addictive. I knew that they were essential. At first, it was words that sometimes took hold with their own momentum. Then I learned how voice could ground me in those moments and take over. And, finally, that flexibility was something I came to rely on.

There are still moments of what I call “making it up.” I talk to my students about this feeling, trying to put it into words. Of course, we’re always “making it up,” as writers of fiction – and too as poets and memoirists (as rebuilding memory and expressing it is an re-imaginative act). But I hate these moments when I feel myself writing. Sometimes they last just a few minutes until I find a way in to the work. Other times, the feeling endures – usually when there’s something new about what I’m writing, something I haven’t encountered before – it feels like I’m out of my depth, at sea. This is ultimately a good thing. I’m teaching myself something – new wiring is being formed.

I’m demanding about generating pages when teaching emerging writers – fiction, poetry, nonfiction and screenplays. The practice of writing pages helps you create pages, but also leads to those glorious moments when the work begins to write itself.

In sports – stay with me non-sports types, trust me – good coaches always make sure that their players have endurance because that conditioning is in their control. They can’t, for example, teach hunger for goals or ambition and drive. But like workshop leaders, they can help to create an atmosphere of taking risks and encouraging ambitious moves.

Can a good coach breakdown skill sets? Yes, and so can a good workshop leader – an exercise on dialogue, another solely on surface tension, another on subtext. But can they teach what’s perceived as athletic clairvoyance and split-second intuition? No. Those moments that seem like clairvoyance – on the playing field and on the page – you know what I mean, right? You’re writing without really thinking about writing. Split-second decisions are happening word by word and you’re not conscious of those thoughts. It’s as if your mind is fully wired to your fingers at the keyboard just as the athlete’s body is wired to the ball, the field of play, the defense…

How does this wiring happen? It’s not God-given alone for either the writer or the athlete. What you’re actually seeing as a fan or a reader is the result of hours drilled into a craft. This might seem obvious to many of you. But for so many reasons, we believe athletes are born athletic and writers are born creative. What’s talent without time spent tending to that talent? It’s typical. It’s the rule. But, again, stick with me on this athlete/writer comparison.

Here’s a quote from Tracy Steven Peal, a speed coach and poet.

“I am very privy to the highly programmable nervous system of elite players. What is logically deemed as athletic clairvoyance, is actually a mapping, let’s say habitual patterning, that’s actually rehearsed over and over and over again on the field of play. What the spectator is seeing is actually the resultant – what makes it special and unique, is how individual athletes process this sensory information and know how to act (react is too late)… [An athlete can have] this anticipatory knack, which is more seamlessly hard-wired into his consciousness, his being. Great athletes create on the fly, sifting through the myriad of options (Bernstein’s degrees of freedom, I suppose), to find the most logical solution to the competitive matrix. It truly speaks of inspiration, perception, neuroplasticity, skill acquisition, talent, fascial networking and spatial awareness – all in a matter of milliseconds.”

What the writer is doing when at the page is this mapping, this habitual patterning. The hope is that you are going to find more and more stretches of time in which your work seems to be writing itself. So many processes that are intellectual and very conscious – and sometimes self-conscious – when you’re at the early stages of your craft are going to become unconscious. Like when you first learned to walk, it was a very conscious effort that has become unconsciously wired now.

That said, writing for writing’s sake – just to drill in the hours – shouldn’t be blind practice. [Read more…]