Writing Naturally
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- July 26th, 2008 |
- Comments
Have you ever found yourself cragfast in your writing like a child on a rocking horse? Rocking back and forth, writing and editing, and inquisitive why your account doesn’t accept you anywhere?
As a writer for a local weekly newspaper, I couldn’t afford the luxury of writing and editing. I just had to compose and anxiety about editing later; thither’s something about a deadline that moves you along.
So how do you learn to move beyond the wooden horse, to the real horse, that account or article that will accept you across vistas where the insolate sets in marmalade skies and where the grass ripples like a green oceangoing?
As a painter, I’ve learned the duration of painting from the right broadside of your brain. The right brain paints what it sees, whereas the left paints what it thinks it should be. I wondered to myself if thither were something for writers along these same lines. I discovered thither was.
Our brains are divided into cardinal hemispheres right and left and are joined by a antic piece of gray matter called the corpus collusum. The corpus collusum acts like a switching base. In right-brain driven individuals it tends to be larger. The right brain could be referred to as the feminine or creative broadside (the writer) whereas the left-brain (the editor) could be referred to as the male or logical broadside.
The left brain provides us with language, structure, denotation, analytical cerebration, logic, math, etc. In the right brain, we discover creativity, patterns of channel, metaphor, ambiguities, and paradox.
In right-brain painting classes the educator gets you to let go of the image of what you believe you accompany, to perception only what is thither and consequently drawing it. This is done by action a picture, placing it upside down, and covering up all but a little portion of the picture. You begin to draw only what you accompany on the page. As you move along, you expose a little more of the picture as you draw. Practice this erstwhile to learn to free up your right brain.
You may be inquisitive - do you compose upside down? No - you don’t. According to Gabrielle Lusser Rico, author of the book Writing The Natural Artifact, “if you can communicate, form letters on the page, know the rudiments of syntax, accept a phone message, or compose a thank-you note, you have adequate language skills to learn to compose the natural artifact.”
In her first chapter, “Releasing Your Inner Writer,” Rico describes the cardinal different hemispheres of the brain as “Clue and Design” Mind. She describes the interplay between the cardinal hemispheres and lets us know that any good coagulated writing is collaboration between these cardinal talents of the cardinal hemispheres.
In her 2nd chapter lay the real gems. Here’s where we learn to “cluster” or “map” our creative cerebration process. She calls clustering the “doorway to your design mind.” The method she utilizes begins with a “nucleus morpheme” or abbreviated phrase that “acts as the stimulant for recording all the associations that become to mind in a real brief period of time.”
You accept your nucleus morpheme or phrase and compose it in the middle of a page, drawing a circle around it. So you let yourself free associate. Every cerebration, feeling, or idea that comes from that morpheme you expense in little bubbles away from that “nucleus morpheme” but attached by a line. You keep going until you feel the shift in your mind to quit. You may have to do this various times before you recognize the feeling. It’s ok - tell yourself it’s just play.
She tells us that this methodology is not “merely the spilling of words and phrases at random, but something much more complex: for the Design mind, each association leads inexorably to the next with a logic of its own even tho’ the Clue mind does not perceive the connection.” This is learning to compose from the creative broadside of your brain.
This methodology of clustering is like throwing a rock into a pond, it unfolds from the center, each ripple, or cerebration moving outward. After the completion of the clustering, (and you will learn to know when this occurs), you compose a description, a poem, whatsoever strikes you, exploitation the words from your clustering program blade and whatsoever else comes out of you.
What you’ll find is an interesting piece, almost like poetry, with an unknown beauty emanating from inside you. It’s a real rewarding experience.
With enough practice, you won’t even need to do the “clustering” approach, as you’ll be able to feel the shift internally into that hemisphere of the brain, not different shifting into high gear.
Peter Elbow, the author of “Writing with Power” says, “When we were little we had no difficulty superficial the artifact we felt; thusly most little children communicate and compose with real expression.”
Read your writing aloud. Words are meant to be expressed aloud. When you hear it, you’ll hear those places where it doesn’t flow and you’ll feel it. They’ll abide of your sentences and paragraphs like stickers in your socks.
As a writer - it’s also important that you allow yourself time. Time to practice, time to play, time to perfect. With time, you’ll discover yourself as a writer. You’ll find your expression. You’ll lift it to sing.
Attempt different things. Compose poetry. Compose a movie critique. Compose a account. Attempt writing a newspaper article, a how-to. Attempt describing the indescribable. Challenge yourself. Thither’s nothing that says you have to appear it to anybody. Most professional writers (and best-selling authors) have dozens of journals they wouldn’t even appear their best friends.
Writing doesn’t necessarily mean sculpting every morpheme from your mind with a chisel. Your head is not a rock. Be gentle with yourself. Enjoy, kick back, let loose, attempt this clustering method, learn to relax that muscle between your ears, and who knows, one day, all of abrupt, you just might find yourself writing.
Naturally.