Week 4. Day 7. Quiet
How are you going with your daily writing prompts, I wonder?
I hope that you are beginning to remember your own creative instinct. I hope that you are casting aside the inner editor and making mess on the page. I hope that you are connecting playfully with your own voice.
At the heart of the Immersion program is the invitation to listen to your own “still, small voice”. It’s built on lessons that I seem to need to learn again and again and again, and on understanding that it’s all within you already.
I don’t mean to sound too “woo” when I say that. I simply mean that the obstructions to your own creativity are often the noise and clutter that block the ability to simply be quiet and wait.
In that state – quiet receptivity, a sort of prayerful, attentive state – we can “show our ideas that they are welcome”, to paraphrase the American writer Sarah Sentilles, and we can provide space for them to flourish.
So today, on our day of rest, sit in quiet. Try to create as much quiet as you can. Switch the radio or television off. Turn the music off for a while. If it’s possible, spend some time without conversation, and without reading a screen. Ideally, without even reading at all.
Just you and your breath and the quiet.
Because in the quiet your “still, small voice” will have the space to speak.
Your prompt for today:
Someone is whispering
Week 4. Day 6. Babble
Have you seen that viral video of two babies talking to each other in a kitchen? Nappies dangling, they slap their thighs, wave their arms around in front of the fridge and nod vigorously as they have a lengthy and intense conversation conducted entirely in babble. The internet is great for this stuff (not now! Later!) There’s another one of a father chatting with his baby boy about the footie. Baby says something along the lines of “Dub bah blub buh” and father replies, “Absolutely, he shouldn’t have gone for that try, I was thinking the same thing.” Baby nods and adds an even more cogent point about the game.
Of course, it’s how babies learn to speak. We listen to the rhythm and inflection of conversation and mimic it. Most of us do this before we start to apply meaning to the language.
There’s an old actor’s trick, a rehearsal game, which I loved when I was at drama school – where you perform a scene in a nonsense language. The idea is that this allows the actors to find the connection in the scene, to let movement and gaze and silence carry as much meaning as the actual dialogue.
I loved it when I was a young actor because – like those babies in the kitchen – it always felt both profoundly serious and profoundly playful.
The film “Nude Tuesday”, written by Jackie Van Beek, is performed entirely in gibberish. In an interview with Screen Australia, Beek said, “I wrote the screenplay in English… but what I was constantly trying to do was make sure that I wasn’t exposing any really important story information through dialogue. On set we would rehearse the scene in English then we’d flip it into gibberish for one rehearsal and then… roll camera, roll sound and action.”
Language is for meaning, of course – but it’s also for rhythm.
I remember a writer friend showing me their work in progress, and laughing at a paragraph which read something like:
“She sat, watching. Everything was still. He walked ahead, something dum da dadda.” My friend knew the rhythm the phrase needed, just not – in that draft – the words.
It put me in mind of watching the film “Get Back”, in which George Harrison sings “Something in the way she moves, attracts me like a pomegranate” and John Lennon corrects him, “Cauliflower is better.”
They know the scansion the song needs, just not the words. Later, Lennon says, “Just say what comes into your head each time, like ‘a cauliflower’, until you get the word.”
Reaching for the precise word is a particular kind of effort. Sometimes, it’s a joy. Other times, it can interfere. Instead, try writing “what comes into your head each time, like ‘a cauliflower’”. You might discover, like Harrison, that you can short-circuit the striving editorial process and cut straight to pure rhythmic instinct.
Today, get your gibberish on. Write a piece of dialogue, or a complete scene, using nonsense. Begin with a line or two of dialogue – perhaps the phrases from yesterday’s exercise – and then alternate lines of English (or another language if you are fluent enough) and gibberish.
Let babble do some of the connection today, and let it lead you deeper into play.
Your prompt for today:
The words made no sense
Week 4. Day 5. Listen up
Last year I visited the Opera House to see a play with some friends, one of whom is a playwright. Outside, during the interval, we began posing jokingly for selfies (or “facies” as my mother used to call them). A woman standing near us asked that universal tourist question, “Would you like me to take your photo together?” When we thanked her, she said, “I live in Manly. I’m on permanent standby for tourist shots.”
While I was still laughing, my friend the playwright had whipped out their own phone and made a note on it, muttering, “I might use that.” On the way back into the theatre, my friend added, “I’m a playwright. I’m on permanent standby for found dialogue.”
Listening to the way people really speak – the way they change tack or make jokes or surprise themselves – is a rich source of inspiration and connection.
Among my friends I am known for my love of booths in cafes and restaurants. If there is a place with a booth, I want to eat there. I’ll travel for a good booth, and I will choose a two-star meal over a four-star one if there is a five-star booth. But my friends don’t know the reason that I love booths.
They’re the perfect set up for a good eavesdrop. I can sit, making notes, grabbing bits of conversation – found dialogue – as they drift past.
Earlier this week, in the spirit of Virginia Woolf, I asked you to observe your own “Mrs Brown”. Today, I invite you to find some dialogue.
If you have a booth-heavy café nearby (do let me know the location, so I can try it) – pop in and see if you overhear a line of dialogue that piques your imaginative interest. Public transport – trains or train stations, ferries, buses – are brilliant for bits of found dialogue, as are walking paths, beaches, parks and shops.
Essentially, I’m asking you to pay attention. To sit somewhere and listen, to notice what attracts you, to observe your own imaginative spark.
Then, when you have a moment, take two separate bits of found dialogue and put them together. One after the other. Use those two lines to lead you into a scene written entirely in dialogue.
So for instance, I might take the overheard line from outside the Opera House and another line, overheard in my local fruit shop yesterday. So my conversation begins like this:
A: I’m on permanent standby for tourist shots.
B: Does anyone even like avocadoes?
Who are these people? What is this conversation?
I’m going to write down the page, keeping as always, the spirit of play and simply see where it leads.
Write just one page. Read it out loud. Does anything spark?
Look for the energy in those random lines.
Do those non sequiturs – lines that appear not to follow on from each other – suggest new connections or possibilities?
Keep the habit of listening, and of recording. You never know when you might want to play.
Your prompt for today:
I can’t believe I said it out loud
Week 4. Day 4. White Fang it
In Week Two, I asked you to think about the artists who are your role models – to consider those artists, dead or alive who make you want to create more, who make you want to stretch to your full promise. Today, I want to dig more deeply into that question.
Some years ago, I mentored the writer Emma Harcourt, as she worked on her first historical novel. I’d suggested some things to read, and about halfway through our work together, I noticed that Emma’s already powerful writing had stepped up to a new level. Thrilled, I asked her what the change had been. Honestly, I was fully expecting that her answer would be, “You happened, Kathryn!” She didn’t say that. Instead, she said: “I started reading Michael Ondaatje and now I just read a paragraph and, whoosh, I’m off”.
Emma had found her Kipling.
Let me explain.
Like Emma, the writer Jack London honed his voice through encountering another writer’s rhythms and words. Jack London, the author of White Fang, knew he wanted to write novels – but he didn’t know how. A product of his time, he was a fan of Rudyard Kipling. London set himself the task of copying out, in longhand, Kipling’s works – reasoning that the process of absorbing himself in Kipling’s language would teach him how it was done. At the end of the process, when he believed he had Kipling’s voice by heart, by some alchemical magic, London had found his own novelistic voice. One that is clearly quite different, it turns out, from the writer who inspired him.
Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, said that he found his style through a sort of mimicry of Evelyn Waugh, adding “although no-one notices”. Conversely, Samuel Beckett, author of Waiting for Godot, was an apprentice to James Joyce. It was only when he realised he would never be able to write like Joyce, and finally didn’t want to, that he discovered his own highly distinctive voice. Beckett, the Irishman, needed to write in French to break free of Joyce’s influence.
What I’m talking about here is not the act of mentoring, but of an absorption in the style of a writer you admire which can sometimes, miraculously, open up a whole new element in your own voice.
Today, can you return to considering the work of a writer you admire? In particular, I invite you to find a page or a passage of their writing that particularly pleases you.
Now. Look at that piece of writing. Let’s get forensic.
What is it that you admire here? Try to find two or three really specific elements and write them down. Two or three words or phrases that capture what the writing is doing.
For instance – today I might choose the Tove Jansson novel Fair Play, which I love and admire. I’m going to look at a page of the novel and try to get clear about what I admire in the style. I might jot down: cool and precise writing; lots of subtext – letting things be unspoken; no clutter in the language, very spare.
Your list will be different of course – but try to articulate to yourself what it is that you admire. Not simply, “I like it”, but – “Everything is lush, musical, the characters are explosive…”
And then, your next step is to “White Fang it”. In other words, as Jack London did with Kipling, take those elements into your own writing.
So now, I invite you to write a page or two using the elements of the other writer. If you need a context suggestion, it’s this: someone is engaged in some sort of physical activity. That’s it. But try to write this situation, using the three elements you’ve identified in the other writer.
So, I might take a scene from my memoir, where I’m pulling up a net on a fishing boat, and I’m going to write it aiming for “cool and precise writing, subtext, spare language”.
You will almost certainly find, as Jack London and Emma Harcourt did in their different ways, not that you become a pale version of the other writer – but that you uncover some hidden element of your own voice.
Try it. Like Emma, you might stumble upon the magic slide that – whoosh! – sends you soaring into your own writing adventure.
Your prompt for today:
High above the fenceline
Week 4. Day 3. Connect with the body
A few years ago I went to see a dance-theatre production in Spain, Ponte en sus Zapatos, a physical theatre exploration of the concept of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. (The title literally translates as ‘Put yourself in their shoes”). At one point, each of the performers enacted a sort of physical mime of a set of feelings: holding the belly while doubling over with hilarity; beating the chest in anger; holding the head in an act of sorrow. It was as though each body part held a particular feeling.
When we see someone miming doubling over, hand on the belly, it’s an almost universal sign for laughter or happiness. Likewise, the chest-beating, or the head in hands. It’s a kind of physical shorthand.
But sometimes it’s not that clear.
For years I would get a tight throat in certain situations of conflict, or even tension. Touring with a theatre company in the UK, with a difficult director, I would find my throat aching repeatedly. Eventually, rather belatedly, I realised that the tight throat happened every time the difficult director issued a new, contradictory, instruction.
The tight throat was anger.
We carry everything in our bodies, whether we pay attention or not. When we experience emotion, we feel it first in our bodies.
Writing is about noticing and recording as much as it is about imagining. Remember back in week one I asked you to celebrate your body, feel its connection to the earth? Today, I wonder if you can observe and map the way your body holds feeling.
Begin with considering your dominant sense. What I mean by that is, what is the sense that you most rely on in the world? Is there one?
What is your memory sense? The sense by which you call up memory?
Is it different from the one which you most call on in your daily life?
Now, move to emotions. Recall a moment of joy. Sit with it. Let it expand in your body. Where in the body do you feel it? Can you locate it?
What about anger? Where does that sit for you?
Where in your body is sadness located?
Fear?
Hope?
If you want to take this a little further, take a character – perhaps your Mrs Brown from yesterday, or perhaps a character you have been thinking of or working on – and ask these same questions of them. Where does the character feel joy? Hope? Anger?
And if you’re really wanting to stretch (or you want to return to this thinking later), write a scene in which a dominant feeling is never spoken of directly. For instance, a scene in which the character feels furious – don’t use the word fury, or anger, or cross etc.
Let the body do the work.
Your prompt for today:
He began with the hands
Week 4. Day 2. Find your Mrs Brown
In 1924 the young novelist Virginia Woolf stood in front of a group of students at the University of Cambridge, to speak about the state of the novel. Her talk became the basis for one of her most famous essays, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, which she published the following year. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown is a clarion call to writers, an exhortation to pursue character and a reminder of fiction’s innate compassion. Woolf wrote:
“It seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel”. And when I asked myself, as your invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask myself, what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom, a little figure rose before me – the figure of a man, or of a woman, who said, My name is Brown. Catch me if you can. Most novelists have the same experience. Some Brown, Smith, or Jones comes before them and says in the most seductive and charming way in the world, Come and catch me if you can. And so, led on by this will-o-the-wisp, they flounder through volume after volume, spending the best years of their lives in the pursuit, and receiving for the most part very little cash in exchange.”
Lest you feel overwhelmed by the requirements of character, Woolf reminds us that everyone already “is a judge of character. Indeed, it would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practiced character reading and had some skill in the arts. Our marriages, our friendships depend on it. Our business largely depends on it; every day questions arise which can only be solved by its help.”
Who is your Mrs Brown or your Mr Jones?
Woolf describes meeting her own Mrs Brown in a railway carriage. Could you, today, take yourself to a café or library or bar or train station and wait for your own will-o-the-wisp? Wait and watch, and when someone marches by or sits opposite you or shouts across the concourse to a friend and you feel yourself leaning in, wondering… there they are. There is your Mrs Brown.
Begin to write, then, safe in the knowledge that you are already, as Woolf says, skilled in the art of character-reading. Begin with the walk, or the talk, or the shout. Begin with what you hear or what you see.
Record the movement, the gesture, the voice. Take it all down, and then ask some questions: why does she move in that way? Does she want to avoid attention? Is she pretending to feel safe when she does not? What does she want from that friend sitting next to hear? Where has she come from? What story has she left behind? What is she afraid of? What does she want? What does she feel?
It is an act of connection, an act of love, to create and care for character in this way. To notice. To observe.
One caveat though – exercise discretion in your compassionate observation. Resist the temptation to follow your Mrs Brown or Mr Jones down the street (though I have done this), or to invite yourself into their conversation (though I have also done this).
Observe. See where your Mrs Brown leads you.
Your prompt for today:
When she imagined
Week 4. Day 1. My inspiration
The word “muse” comes from Greek mythology where in the pantheon of gods there were nine goddesses, the Muses, each inspiring a particular area of thought: Thalia for comedy, Melpomene, for tragedy, Terpsichore for dance, Calliope for epic poetry and so on. (“And so on” being shorthand for “I can’t remember the rest”).
The naming of the Muses was, I like to think, a way of personifying the mysteries of inspiration.
Somehow, from the images of these divine Muses, came the much later Romantic image of a muse – usually a beautiful young woman who inspires a great artist. So, when I ask you who your muse is, I’m aware it is a question that comes with a lot of history, a lot of baggage. But your muse is simply a source of inspiration. And it serves you to notice who and where those sources are, so that you can begin to call on them when you need them.
Your muse won’t necessarily take a conventional shape. Stephen King’s certainly doesn’t. He says:
There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement kind of guy.
You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labour, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.
He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but he’s got inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the mid-night oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life.
– Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Hilary Mantel wrote many books before she landed on the age of Tudors. In many interviews she spoke of the sense that while she was writing her other novels and memoirs, she was casting about for “her subject”– and when she came closer to Thomas Cromwell, she finally recognised that shiver of possibility that might herald the arrival of her muse.
But Cromwell wasn’t her only muse. Both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were dedicated to Mary Robertson, who before her retirement in 2013 was the curator of British Historical Manuscripts at the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California. Mantel said she was enormously inspired by Robertson, after developing a “luminous” correspondence with her. What started as a research puzzle became, as Mantel said, a deep friendship. But Mantel also used another word to describe Robertson: muse.
Your own muse may not look anything like a Greek goddess, or a Pre-Raphaelite model, or an American librarian or a cigar-smoking basement guy. It’s your muse, after all.
So now get your journal out. Start writing a dialogue with your muse.
Begin with a simple two-line prompt and keep going for around ten minutes if you can. The idea with these prompts, as always, is to show your ideas that they are welcome, to allow your creative instinct to surprise you – and to let your own muse appear.
Begin with these two call-and-response lines:
I am….
You are…..
Write in that call and response for between five and ten minutes – let it lead you where it will. Try not to dictate who the “you” or “I” are for now. Perhaps the “I” is the muse saying, “I am here waiting…” or perhaps it’s you saying, “I am empty and expectant…”. Just open the door, invite it in. If you find that the “I am” leads into a page of writing, that’s fine. Follow your instinct!
If you feel there’s more to ask at the end of that ten minutes or so, you might want ask your muse some gentle questions, and allow your muse to answer back, in writing.
Hello muse, what are you expecting of me?
What are you hoping for?
What do you have to offer me?
Is there something I need to ask of you?
Noticing and naming the Muses allowed the Greeks to pay homage – For us, it’s a chance to give thanks. Your sources of inspiration are part of your creative toolkit – when you hit a moment of sludge, remind yourself of your own private pantheon of muses and know that you can call on them at any time. And they will answer.
Your prompt for today:
In the quiet of the morning