Actually Writing

This first class presents the “Rosetta Stone” of composing, introducing us to a stance of openness, neutrality, and “susceptibility” while writing. This will enable us to move with greater ease and fluidity down the page, as we build a writing practice.

Begin to master a key move that will freshen and deepen any piece of writing.

Profundity isn’t something inserted into a piece of writing, but rather a bi-product that comes out of engaging in good description. You’re never just describing what you’re describing, when you do it well. 

Yeats’s maxim—“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric/but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry”—applies to all genres. An inadequate quarrel with oneself leads to dead writing. 

You’re writing can always get worse, it probably should, and we can practice this. The surprising importance of bad writing in great literature.

The central channel, a space well-known for centuries in contemplative disciplines, can also be applied to writing, revealing much about us as artists, and opening up our craft.

Rendering a setting, which is often done mechanically, should instead be approached dynamically—the details luminous with the lives and events they implicate.

Situational awareness, paying attention to all aspects of a subject, can complicate your writing in interesting ways. This is another way of following the golden thread, and it can be cultivated.

We ought to be in the interrogative mode—a posture of questioning and wonder—as we come down a page. Even a string of declarative sentences ought to radiate wonder and the urgency of wanting to know, which readers are enlivened by. 

Lists (litanies, catologues, etc.) have a sneaky power over the mind, and great literature, from the Bible to Joan Didion, is full of them. When approached creatively, the act of listing can yield amazing insights and subjects for further writing.