Week One: Contemplation
Week 1. Day 7. Heave to
Sunday is traditionally a day of rest and resetting. At the bottom of the page, there will still be a prompt but today is all about rest. Today we celebrate the power of the circuit-breaker.
I was twenty the first time I discovered the power of a circuit breaker. I’d been battered by a series of traumatic events that left me almost unmade.
How far, I wondered, would I need to travel to get away from myself and from the story which I was in? How far, before I could change the habits that were undoing me?
Like a wild animal operating solely on instinct, I headed north from Sydney, as far as I could go, until the land ran out and that still wasn’t far enough. And then, I stepped on to a fishing boat—the Ocean Thief—and headed out into the Timor Sea. I was un-muscled, unused to physical work; I had no idea what I was in for.
But when I stepped on to the Ocean Thief and saw my first ocean sunset with that great orange disc crashing down, seabirds swooping and fluttering I understood that something new was possible. The work in those first weeks was mystifying and I was ill-prepared. I hadn’t known the way my body would shake with working, before unraveling with exhaustion.
After four weeks, the life I’d left behind seemed more alien than my new life on the rusted trawler. For the first time, I could feel my muscles, could hold tight to the metal trawling boom as it tilted on a roiling sea while tropical storms lashed at my face. Holding tight despite fear, being useful, these things were new. And so, I was new.
My months on the Ocean Thief, the months I wrote about in Fury, culminated in treachery and failure. Yet when I stepped back on to land after that wild, disastrous season, I was transformed. Stronger, yes, but more than that. I had found the beginning of the self I wanted to be, had experienced the power of elsewhere.
My life is immensely different now from the one I was in as a traumatised young woman. But that twenty-year-old self taught me the thing which sustains all elements of my life now: the power and importance of removing myself from my patterns. The power of a circuit-breaker.
When I find myself now in my writing life to be in a spiraling pattern, I know enough to stop trying. Stop trying to make it work without removing myself from the situation.
It’s not uncommon for sailors, mid-storm or in high winds, to heave to—in other words, stop trying to wrangle the sail, manage the rudder. You simply stop. Draw breath. Gather your thoughts and either wait for the wind to pass or try a different tack.
The power is in the pause.
When we are in storms, even minor ones, we can feel like we must keep fighting the elements, keep sailing, keep winning. The circuit-breaker is my not-so-secret weapon.
At its heart, the practice I’m describing is simply this: stop doing what you’re doing, draw breath, and let a different habit emerge.
If the turning up at your desk isn’t working – take a walk, have a nap (Jaclyn Moriarty has built quite the writerly thesis around the power of the nap), listen to a hypnosis app (I love Darren Marks, a British hypnotherapist who does lots of ‘inspiration and creativity’ audio apps), sit beneath a tree and breathe, take a bath…..
Rest and reset. It’s what you’re doing, now, by embarking on Immersion: Deep.
Today, pause. Let the sails loose and see what emerges.
Heave-to, me hearties, heave-to.
Your prompt for today:
A stream of light
Week 1. Day 6. Longing
Longing is at the heart of art. It drives story and it drives storymakers.
Longing is such a beautiful word. It feels richer, deeper, than desire. Stronger than wanting.
Like many English words, it comes from a mashup of Saxon and Germanic words – one, from the old German, verlangen, meaning ‘to desire’. The other though, is an Old English word, langian – which literally means to lengthen.
What I adore about this is the idea that what we long for makes us longer, bigger, deeper. That if we fail to notice our longing, we keep ourselves smaller.
Today, I invite you to observe your own longing. There’s no need to do anything with it right now. No need to wrestle it or squash it down, or even to take action on it. Not today.
Today, simply observe.
Today, sit with your journal (please tell me you have a journal! If you don’t, use whatever notepad you can find) and reflect on some simple questions.
Write the questions down. Contemplate them. Allow yourself to imagine that there are no limits, no obstacles.
Take some time to answer these questions, to tell the truth, to be brave. No-one is watching.
- What do I long for in my creative life?
- What might I allow myself to want as a writer?
- What is the hunger, the longing, I have for my creative practice?
- What do I long for my writing to do?
- If there were no limits of any kind, what would I want?
Keep writing until you hit something which feels like the truth. Sit with that longing. Observe it. Contemplate it. Revel in knowledge that opening the door to it will lengthen you and strengthen you.
Desire drives narrative, and it drives creation.
Your prompt for today:
Write a time someone asked for something
Week 1. Day 5. Feel the earth
When I was twenty and worked for a long, hard season as a deckhand on a trawler in the Timor Sea, I became used to a constantly shifting surface. When we docked in Darwin for repairs, after weeks at sea, I stepped onto land and felt my legs buckle beneath me. I’d forgotten the solidity of land, the steady holding of gravity. What I remember is the strangeness of noticing the earth in a new way, as though I had never properly paid attention before.
Your body is the carrier of your creative work. It’s the site of your sensory experience as well as your emotional life.
When Carole King sings ‘I feel the earth move under my feet,’ she’s calling up a metaphor that works because of the sensory truth. When we fall in love (even that – falling – is a physical metaphor) – we feel it in our bodies.
Can you be grateful for this gift of your body, whatever its limitations? Can you celebrate it?
In particular, can you notice today you connect with the earth, in this vessel of your body? Take time today, if you can, to simply stand on the earth, barefoot if you are able. Feel the ground beneath your feet. Notice the pull of gravity. Attend to the precise sensations of heat or cold on your soles. Wriggle your toes, notice the grass or dirt or concrete.
If you can, lie on the ground and feel the earth beneath your whole body. Close your eyes and notice. Observe your physical self and its connection to the earth. Writing begins with noticing, so take the time to notice your own connection to the earth.
If you have a character you’re thinking about, try to step now into their skin – stand on their earth, lay on the ground as if you are in their body. Let your body be the guide into your imagination.
Imagine this character standing on their own soil. Perhaps it’s someone you’ve never met, a stranger arriving on your page; perhaps it’s you, or a younger version of you. Let them wriggle their toes. What ground is beneath their feet? Concrete? Rock? What is happening in this person’s body? Let them also lie on the ground and feel the earth.
We walk our characters through the world, in their bodies. And through our own writerly bodies, we can access the world.
Your prompt for today:
When the earth moved…
Week 1. Day 4. The music of language
In my second to last year of high school, my English teacher introduced me to the power of
reading poetry aloud. She began with Hopkins, pacing up and down the classroom, her voice
rising and falling. Rather than asking us to study the poems, she invited us to enter them.
“Just listen,” she would say. At home, I read Kenneth Slessor’s poem Five Bells aloud to my
empty room. To this day I can’t board a night-time Sydney ferry without feeling a sad shiver
as I recall the line, “I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in, the night you died”.
Like music, poetry can fill me with melancholy, with terror, with longing, with delight.
Sometimes, we find ourselves stuck on the same track with our language, with our thoughts.
We forget that language is also about rhythm, and about delight.
Sometimes I find myself (usually mid-draft) stuck in what I think of as ‘getting there’
writing. I’m moving people about getting them here and there… but I’ve lost rhythm, joy,
delight.
Language is music. It’s our first tool as writers, whether we’re creating poetry, memoir, self-
help books or company reports. Rhythm can lead us deeper to the heart of our writing.
Poetry is the written form which comes closest to working with rhythm. And for me, poetry is
best spoken out loud, whether proclaimed or whispered.
Today, for delight and to remember rhythm, I invite you to find a poem and speak a few lines
out. Speak softly or loud. Take a walk and mutter the words to yourself as you walk. Pace
your house or garden speaking the stanzas.
Roll the words about, enjoy the sound and feel of them. Notice the way the words feel in your
mouth. (Seriously – I’ve spent the last few years learning Spanish and one of the things I
adore about it is the feel of the words in my mouth. This, I realise, is partly because I’ve long
ago stopped noticing how words feel in my native tongue. The physicality of language is one
of its pleasures. (In my early twenties, I performed poetry throughout the UK. It was the
nineties, and so I am sorry to say that there was frequent ‘softening into the floor’.)
Speak. Proclaim. Whisper. Mutter. Move if it pleases you.
If you want to take the rhythm further, write the line down at the top of a page and let it lead
you to another line of your own. Let the rhythm and musicality of the line inform the
temperature of your own writing. Write another line and another, speaking the lines out loud,
revelling in the poetry of your own words, your own new rhythm.
The idea is not to interpret but simply to listen. No judgement, just contemplation.
Some poems I love to speak out loud:
Ghazal for Staying Safe, Munira Tabassum Ahmed
The Windhover, Gerard Manley Hopkins
Play with the words, find the lines that make you sing, that lead you to your own music.
Writing isn’t just about meaning, about character, about story. It’s also music. Find the
rhythm in your words.
You might prefer to speak the words of a song (which is, after all, poetry set to music).
Remember Kylie Minogue deadpanning the lyrics to ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ with Nick
Cave? Anything can become this sort of play.
And when you’ve played with the sound of someone else’s words, speak your own. Proclaim
them. Celebrate the rhythm of your language. When you speak your words aloud, as though
they are poetry, you’ll start to notice your own rhythms.
Your prompt for today:
The rush of words…
Week 1. Day 3. Forget the audience
I was ten, the first time I sailed a dinghy. The boat was a sabot, and the coach at the sailing
club drew three lipstick lines on the gunwale of the boat: reach, run, work. I spent summers
sailing for several years, and then returned to it in my adult life, sailing single-handed racing
dinghies for pleasure for many years. All of which is to say that I have thousands of small-
boat sailing hours. And in those thousands of hours of social sailing, I have never injured
myself.
I’m leading with that caveat because the story I’m about to tell you doesn’t reflect well on
me.
A few years ago, I decided to join my local sailing club and learn to race single-handed
dinghies, which I hadn’t done since childhood. On sailing boats, the boom is the pole that
attaches to the mast and holds the sail in place. When you turn the boat into the wind, the
boom swings across the boat. And on a small boat, you need to duck when this happens.
One Saturday, one of my companions smacked his head on the boom. The following week,
my partner did the same. How did you manage that, I asked him? If you’re paying attention
there is no reason to ever smack your head. You know where your body is, and you know
where the boom is.
I know you can see where this is going. Pride comes before…
But this is not about pride. It’s about attention.
So, the following week, I was sailing the dinghy (it’s called a Laser, and they are really great
fun) while a few of my sailing buddies watched from a small motorboat. I was on a beautiful
line, the boat angled to the side while I leant out from the gunwale. I was quite taken with
how spectacularly I was sailing, how impressed those watching would be. Another sailor was
a little ahead of me, and I decided that I was going to nip in behind him, steal his wind, and
win the race. More than that, I was going to mightily impress my audience in the motorboat. I
looked over to them, to make sure they were watching. They were.
I puffed my chest. I gybed into the wind.
I heard the clunk of the boom before I felt anything. My first thought was “how
embarrassing.” And in the moment that I spent thinking about how embarrassed I was, the
boom swung back and hit me again.
There was an ambulance, there were stitches, and there was a salutary reminder.
There was, sadly, no-one to blame but myself for my sore head and wounded ego. And the
reason? I stopped focusing on the moment and focused instead on the audience.
In creative pursuits, you’re less likely to end up with stitches, but the same rule applies.
Forget the audience. Forget the agent, the publisher, the market.
When you are in the middle of making, of creating (or of sailing) the only thing you need to
attend to is the moment. Attend to the sheer joy of the thing: the wind, the wilderness, the
word.
So today, begin with a sentence. Let it lead you to the next one. Ask it what happens next.
Keep listening to your own words, following each sentence as though it were a paving stone,
laid out in a path for you to find your way, one moment at a time. Today, forget about the
audience.
Your prompt for today:
Beneath the surface
Week 1. Day 2. The sound of my heartbeat
Quite a few years ago I was asked to deliver the address for the NSW Premier’s Literary
Awards at a lavish dinner in one of my favourite spaces in Sydney, the Mitchell Reading
Room. When I arrived at the dinner, I found that I was seated at a table full of people I’d
admired for years. As the moment for my address came closer and closer, my nerves grew.
My heartbeat seemed to grow louder until – just before I was about to speak – it was all I
could hear. Before my name was called, I leaned over to my partner and asked him if he
could hear my heart pounding. It wasn’t rhetorical. I was convinced that the ker-thump of my
anxious heart sounded through the entire room.
Composer John Cage insisted, “there is no such thing as silence. Something is always
happening that makes a sound.” In 1951, Cage studied sound and its absence, spending time
in an echoless chamber. He reported hearing his heartbeat and the blood coursing through his
body. After negative audience response to his composition 4’33″—three movements without
a note—he wrote: “What they thought was silence because they didn’t know how to listen,
was full of accidental sounds.”
Those sounds that are always with us – the sound of our own hearts, the sound of our breath,
of our bodies moving, the sound of our own presence – often seem like silence. But the act of
paying attention, listening to our own selves as well as listening to the world, is a
foundational element in creativity. Before we make something new, we attend to where we
are.
This is a kind of mindfulness. To pause and simply notice.
So today, pause. Listen. Take some time to simply write down every noise you can hear.
Everything. The far-off traffic, the faint birdsong, that horn tooting down the road, the hush
of wind, your hand moving across the page, your breath, the sound of swallowing…
This attention is implicitly without judgement. It is simply noticing. Attending. Invention,
after all, grows from observation.
Write what you hear in whatever form suits you whether it’s bullet points, half words or full
sentences.
Your job is simply to listen, and to record.
If you can, take a few moments each day this week to listen and record in this way. Notice
yourself diving deeper into the listening. Notice yourself diving deeper into the listening.
You’ll then begin to bring this listening in to your writing: what can your characters hear?
What are the sounds in the world you are making on the page? Attention. Detail. Life.
Can you hear your own heartbeat?
Your prompt for today:
The water was deep…
Week 1. Day 1. Where am I?
Welcome to Immersion, the daily program designed to reignite your creative passion and
bring you back to yourself. My hope for you is that the Immersion deep dive will restore you
to your creative flow.
Every morning, you’ll receive an email like this one, with a reflection or strategy and at the
bottom of the email, there will be a unique writing prompt.
Immersion: Deep is a circuit-breaker, a gentle nudge back to what you already know how to
do: be creative. These daily emails, and your daily response, form the heart of the program
and I promise you that if you set aside twenty to thirty minutes each day to attend to the
practice, you will find your creative depth and ease by the end of seven weeks.
When you arrive at the end of each day’s message, you’ll find a sentence or image, a prompt
to use in your own writing. It might be an instruction (‘write about…’) or a sentence to jump
from (‘The flowers bloomed early…’) or perhaps an image (‘green leaves’).
Whatever it is, try to let yourself leap in.
Take a breath before you begin (we’ll be talking a lot about breath in this program) and, if
you have a novel or memoir in mind, let it bubble gently to the surface. If you don’t have a
clear project, just breathe. Then read the prompt for the day, and as soon as a thought or
image or sentence arrives (even if that sentence is: this prompt means nothing to me) – begin.
Try to keep writing, and ideally – if you’re able to – write longhand. If no image arrives,
that’s fine. Begin by writing the starting prompt and then rewrite it. Change a word, then
another. Eventually, something will awake.
So you might have a prompt which is “The flowers bloomed early’ – but no image arrives.
You could simply write the sentence again. Then, the second or third time, you might write,
the flowers bloomed late. Try it again. Perhaps the next line is the flowers didn’t bloom. Keep
writing until your timer sounds, or you hit the end of the page. It’s fine if what you write is
not ‘useful’. What we’re trying to do here is connect you to your instinct, and your instinct is
connected to your body.
Try to show up for your daily prompt at a similar time each day, if it’s possible. So much of
the creative life is simply about honouring your intention to do the work. That said, this
program is about being kind to yourself, so if you find it works for you to mix it up,
sometimes morning and sometimes lunchtime or evening – mix away.
Each week of this Immersion program has a guiding theme and we begin, this week, with
contemplation. That word, contemplation, is often associated with silent traditions, but its
original meaning (from the Latin word contemplori) is simply ‘the act of looking at.’ That’s
it. To contemplate is to look. Implicitly, that action suggests that we observe without
judgement.
Before we embark on any program of change, we need to contemplate, to consider where we
are. So today, I invite you to enter into the state of contemplation, the state of simply
observing, without judgement.
Take a few moments now to do this one simple thing: write down your thoughts. All of them.
Follow the thread. Keep your hand moving as you begin to listen to your own thoughts. Take
five to ten minutes (set a timer if you like) and keep writing. You may notice that the act of
listening to your thoughts slows them a little. Write on scrap paper so that you avoid the need
to be precious.
The important thing in that five or ten minutes is that you write without judgement or
opinion. Today, you are simply observing. This spirit of quiet observation without judgement,
of following the thread of your thoughts, will lead you to your own curiosity and to your own
creative instincts. It will lead you to immersion.
Your prompt for today:
Write about walking through an open door