Dear New Class Rookies and Seasoned Vets,

I’m writing this to give an overview to the classes. Our classes are not like any other workshops I know of (and I’ve workshopped around a bit). My methods based on what scientists, PhDs, and other smarties know about how the human brain works. Cognition is the big word for brain-working. When I was teaching English and workshopping around, I found a fair amount of confusion and a whole passel of advice and “wisdom,” yet nobody could give reasons for much of anything. The cognitive model gives reasons and it helps writers get better control and experience more fun in writing.

“Is this any good” is the question that drives many other workshops. While Write Yourself Free method will improve your writing—we’ll take what’s good and make it better— I believe that more important is your sense of fun, creativity and control. The process of writing must be a pleasurable, even powerful exercise for you. You will have more pleasure if you know what you’re doing. You will know your writings good without having to ask.

Knowing what’s good begins with knowing what you’re doing. For this class, there are four aspects of the writing process I’d like you to think about to deepen your understanding.

Projects and practice

Drafting

Revising

Models and Paradigms

Projects and practice—

Writers need projects.

If you know what you want, you’re likely to get it, so define what you want to work on, yes, write it out.

If you’re just starting you might write: “I want to write four very short stories” or “I want to write some episodes from my memoir.” Choose a project you can complete in the 8 weeks of our session..

Note: “Becoming a published writer” or “getting better” are not projects; the former won’t happen in 8 weeks, the latter will, but only if you know what “better” means.

Practice your writing.

Don’t wait for inspiration. Practice means “not perfect,” but you will improve only with practice.

Please write regularly (practice for each workshop). You will need to bring four pages in every week (or fewer for poets, more for playwrights or screenwriters): bring about 6-8 minutes to read, no longer or I may have to stop you.

Short, frequent writing practice is best: several times a week for brief periods of time (15 minutes is fine): if you make the time short, you’ll stay interested; if you do it several times, you will learn faster. Writing four pages in the parking lot before class is practicing how little you respect your writing.

Also Practice thinking:

Read good books,

Learn new words,

Pay attention to tiny beautiful parts of life (use the beautiful as a place to look when you aware that you’re angry or critical). We’re talking mindfulness, here: good writing is usually an expression of mindfulness because it expresses discrete, specific perceptions: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, kinesthetic positioning.

The final bit of thinking practice is to regard the written words as text— products of a frolicsome imagination (not declarations about the author’s life).

This means that you—the writer— never explain your text nor apologize for it. What you write is imaginary play.

Also, you—the reader/listener—listen for what the text says (don’t bother your pretty head with the author’s intention or experience).

This practice will help you focus on the power of the words themselves; at the same time it de-activates moralizing, complaining, explaining, and negative criticizing.

Drafting—

First drafts are important, but not always immortal literature. Play!

Drafting is like pumping iron: over time, you will develop wonderful writing muscles, a gorgeous intellectual physique, and a glowing imagination by going through the mess, and play, and risk of drafting.

What do I mean, “drafting”? Drafting is writing to discover what your imagination has for you. “You” in this sense, are that consciousness awareness of self who is reading this—and a very meager bit of brain cells you are, too. This self is fussy and critical.

“Your imagination” however, is all the other brain cells that involve what Freud called the Unconscious. The trick in drafting is to get “you” to take a nap while your imagination comes out from the Unconscious to play.

And it’s free play when the imagination gets loose. You’re conscious enough to write, but you let anything weird or awful or great or perverse jump onto the page. You want your imagination to get out ahead of the critical you.

We will play with:

fast writing, without figuring out every word before you write it down (what a bore!);

driving your character’s goals or problems (make it difficult);

pre-writing that get the critical “you” a bit more nap-some while exciting the imagination;

allowing yourself to write trash, or vomit, or drivel, or just terrible bollocks. It’s OK.

Your draft can be messy, full of cliches, inconsistent, and simpleminded. Fine. It’s far more important to have many crummy words than three perfect words. Many crummy words are currently on sale in bookstores as books; three perfect words always mean the same thing: “I am dead.”

I advise writers to draft out complete stories (or episodes) without revising.

Keep your protagonist going for the goal, solving the problem; do not fret about the exact right word or perfect sentences (perfect is death). Teach yourself to write in story cycles.

Revision—

Part One: Oftentimes, drafting reveals some great ideas that the writers themselves don’t know are in the text. In class, we’ll try to point them out, so you feel like doing more.

Before you come to class, you may wish to buff up what you’re going to read. This is a part of revision. OK, give it a shot.

However, after each class, I urge you to spend a little time (a half hour) installing any changes you’ve taken away from discussion. Often, I (Patrick) will make some specific suggestions. Plug them in. Please, within 24 hours, before you forget. This minor revision will solidify lessons.

But for the most part, keep your story moving forward; please, don’t begin your writing practice by revising everything you’ve already written. Waste of time.

Part Two: However, there will come a time when your story has a shape, an ending, and you want to polish it up a bit.

Revision is a different kind of play from drafting: it’s still imaginative, but where drafting was just kicking a ball around the house and enjoying busting windows, scaring the cat, and knocking over the Thanksgiving turkey and the gravy boat, revision is more like playing a game of soccer (or “football” as they say in every other part of the world); you need to control the ball between the lines and shoot it into the goal.

Revision may be the best time to refer to the models and paradigms (see below and other document), but you want to divide your revision process into parts.

Work on big things first (is this a good story? Are the causes and effects clear? Is it conflict driven? Do the characters have intricate inner logics?).

Then, and then grind down to smaller things (does each episode begin late and end early? Do episodes all have a prime, define, conflict, reveal structure? Does your root story carry each episode?)

And finally work on sentences. (Most revisors work on sentences first: a waste of time.)

That’s all there is to revision, but you may find some work requires a good deal of revision. Annie Proulx revised “Brokeback Mountain” sixty times before her sense of truth let it go.

Models and Paradigms—

Stories are based on the way our consciousness has developed and how it functions: each of us has learned that s/he is the first person narrator of our her/his own life. We think of ourselves as protagonists, we live in settings, and we understand people as characters. We are goal-seeking, problem-solving beings who developed our understanding of the world with our basic six senses and a limited but flexible repertoire of emotions.

If you understand these things and apply them to writing, then you have a toolbox of a few concepts to help you write better. These tools come in four main categories:

Embodied Writing

The essential story sequence: Prime > Define > Conflict > Reveal

The parts of story: Setting, Character, Action, Point of view, Pattern

The Ongoing Root Story and The Branching Digressive Story

These four are the fundamental tool categories from which this writing method comes from. There are other aspects of story which we could and do study; humor, intimate storytelling, genre, dialog, fantasy, magical realism, unreliable narrator, and so forth, but everything is based in these easy to learn modes.

If you’re writing poetry or plays or nonfiction, don’t worry; the story model is the foundation of human thinking; everything else comes from it.

So, for now, think about Projects and Practice and what you’ll be drafting. The rest will follow. This is a workshop, not a contest. Bring your toys and we’ll have some fun.

I’ll append a handout that explains, again in brief, the models and paradigms. This is what makes Write Yourself Free effective, but again, no memorization necessary.

Cheers,

Patrick

©The Editing Company 2012