Writing Full Tilt

What do you want people to listen for when you read your writing? What do you listen for when someone else is reading? In our everyday lives we listen to each other’s stories and respond by offering a parallel story of our own. We don’t listen for how the story is told. We don’t listen for the ingredients that make it funny or a good character description or the suspenseful pacing. In the best writing workshops we listen in the way we want to be listened to. We want responses that are most helpful to us as writers. The quality of the listening, therefore, is different from swapping news of the day around a kitchen table. For me, listening with the heightened sense of entering someone’s created universe is what creates not only the safety of a good workshop, but the possibility for everyone to go for broke in whatever way they like in their writing. I count this kind of listening as the deepest element of what we do in our shared exploration of perfecting our craft. From my experience this is a unique skill that requires practice, which is why I don’t ask workshop members what they like about a piece of writing. I ask What is working? If a listener responds that they like a bit of dialogue or the way a landscape is described, it probably makes the writer feel good. But that good feeling lasts about a second. The liking doesn’t give the writer anything more to work with. By offering a writer a reason that an element of their writing is strong, it reinforces what’s effective and encourages the writer to build on that skill. Listening for how a piece of writing is put together and how those ingredients combine to make us feel sorrow, intrigue, worry, or joy, is noticing craft. As writers, our job is to notice through heightened listening how our fellow writers achieve what they set out to achieve. Attending to each other in this way helps all of us move more deeply into our writing because we are more deeply heard.

With joy in our words,

Maureen

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Upcoming Events

August Retreat: Hawley Massachusetts August 5 – 8, 2018  https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/

Weekly Workshops: Ten-week Sessions, Thursday evenings, Friday morning. Beginning September 13  & 14, 2018  https://www.writingfulltilt.com/workshops/

February Retreat: Malibu California February 4 – 7, 2018 https://www.writingfulltilt.com/retreats/

Come Write With Me!

Arriving Someplace Unexpected

It’s pretty frequent that before writers read in the workshop, they say, “I didn’t get where I wanted to in my writing.” Sometimes they’re saying they didn’t have enough time to finish what they started. But often they mean that they had an idea of where they wanted to end up but something else happened. Does this sound familiar to you? Beginning with an idea of telling a complete story and not getting to the finish means that something else or a great deal of something elses happened as you entered your work. This is a very good thing. The something else is the surprise of creativity, the subconscious genius that reinvents the story and/or the conscious memory that offers texture and detail. These elements are gifts to a writer. If you tell a story as you intend to tell it, the story will have the basic ingredients for comprehension. But basic comprehension is not why you’re a writer. Surprise and strangeness are essential elements of creativity. By allowing the story to tell itself, characters to manage their own phrasing, and memories to tilt toward one mood or another, the story evolves into its own form. Sometimes you begin where you didn’t plan to begin, perhaps mid-dialogue. Or maybe you include atmosphere like weather or ambient noise. These concrete details hold meaning, create subtle metaphor, under score emotions. As you include these additions or reshape the angle from which the story is told, you relinquish complete control, allowing the writing to have its way. You are inside the writing as it becomes more full and more authentic. You ‘lose’ your way and lose a sense of time. When the artificial time for writing is over in the workshop, you may look at what you have produced with surprise. It isn’t what you set out to produce. But you have created a genuine piece of writing that allows you to re-enter and continue when you’re ready. Not getting to where you first intended to go gives way to your own genius.

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Upcoming Events

Weekly Workshops May 11  – June,14 2018  Workshops

Online Workshops May 7 – June11, 2018  Workshops

Meet Me in a Museum  June 2 & 3, 2018  Museum

August Retreat August 5 – 8, 2018  Retreat

How False are False Starts?

We have all found ourselves staring at a blank page, beginning, beginning again, maybe even beginning once more. Sometimes we write the same line over and over. Sometimes we write ‘nonsense.’ I hear writers in my workshop name these beginnings as ‘false starts,’ as if they are throwaway lines that they dismiss as wasted or ‘going nowhere.’ Or they believe that this writing is in the way of what they really want to say. If we are privileged to hear these writings, it’s often evident that there is nothing false about them. The beginning writing is saying something. One possibility is that this first writing is like toes seeking the bottom of a lake, touching down and seeking traction. It guides the writer to deeper waters. It is needed for getting in touch with what is true for the writer in that moment. The second possibility is that this first writing is more emotional content that elbows its way forward, needing to have its say before the sequential and more standard way of creating a scene can be formed. Often writers call this ‘rambling.’ This kind of visceral expression is powerful and raw, and can startle a writer. The surprise and the direct feeling/words connection can make a writer disbelieve in its validity. But both types of ‘false starts’ are anything but false. They are essential avenues of getting us into our expressive selves, and they as necessary and honest as the steps up to your front door.

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Upcoming Events

Weekly Workshops February 22 – May 10, 2018  Workshops

Online Workshops April 30 – June 18, 2018  Workshops

Meet Me in Manhattan  April 14, 2018  Manhattan

Meet Me in a Museum  June 2 & 3, 2018  Museum

August Retreat August 5 – 8, 2018  Retreat