In a Writer’s State of Mind September 10, 2008
Posted by Becca in Write On Wednesday.trackback
Even though my week has been topsy turvy, filled to the brim with family obligations, car repairs, the beginning of fall musical activities, and of course, regular work responsibilities, I’ve felt the urge to write quite often during the middle of these hectic days. You know what I mean – ideas popping into your head unbidden, like gifts you can’t wait to open, tickling your brain and leaving your fingers itching to pick up a pencil.
Yet even when you get in the mood to write, circumstances aren’t always conducive to actually writing. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could stop everything when the ideas start coming, and write until we’re exhausted? Sadly, that usually isn’t the case, and writing all too often goes on the back burner of life. So we must learn how to rekindle that urge to write, get ourselves mentally and emotionally back into the place where the imagination is free to roam.
The writer’s state of mind, says Jack Heffron, is a state of “alert passivity, a state of mind that allows us to trust our instincts and frees us to take risks.” (The Writer’s Idea Book) The writing state of mind occurs when our brains are alert, yet not aggressively pursuing a train of thought. The phrase my yoga instructor uses is “willful determination without putting pressure on yourself to be perfect.”
Have you ever noticed that your best ideas usually come when you’re doing something completely unrelated to writing? For me, it’s usually when I’m driving to work in the morning…my brain is fresh, I’m anticipating the tasks ahead of me, and then it suddenly occurs to me that the character in my story should already be having an affair when the story starts, or that I could write an interesting essay about that one old home still standing amidst all the new office buildings along Haggerty road.
In her book Becoming A Writer, Dorothea Brande talks about “the mysterious faculty,” which produces “the flashes of insight, the penetrating intuitions, the imagination which combines and transmutes ordinary experience into the illusion of higher reality.” Each person has their own “individual endowment of genius,” she says. We must only learn to “release” it. Often, she advises, it is some totally unrelated activity – walking, driving, cutting grass or scrubbing floors – that puts the writer into a “state of hypnosis” where the unconscious thoughts are allowed to play.
The writing state of mind also occurs when you relax your brain and let your instincts take over. One of the greatest lessons I learned as a performing musician was to let my instincts take over when I stepped on stage – to stop concentrating all my attention on each note and passage, to relax and let all the practice and preparation do the work for me. As writers, we prepare for our writing “performances” by reading good literature, studying the way other writers work, and mostly by keeping our writer’s mind open to life experiences and the world around us, which will bring us all the ideas we could ever need.
There is undoubtedly a lot of hard work involved in good writing. But I think there’s also something a bit mystical about the writing state of mind. Perhaps it’s similar to what athletes call “the zone”…that place in your mind and body when you become one with the activity, when nothing else in the world matters – not hunger or pain, not ringing telephones or barking dogs -except the work in front of you. For writers, it’s the point where you’ve tapped into that state of mind where the ideas flow freely from the deepest well of your imagination, and your fingers can barely keep pace.
How about you? What’s your writing state of mind these days? How do you access that “mysterious faculty” where insight and imagination are nurtured? How do your instincts about your writing ability help you? What’s your experience of being in “the writing zone”?
Mystical…I wholly agree. One interesting post!
http://firmlyrooted.blogspot.com/2008/09/writers-state-of-mind.html
Excellent post, i was thinking about it in the garden this morning and came up with this:
http://craftygreenpoet.blogspot.com/2008/09/gardening-and-writing-state-of-mind.html
I am happy to join on this week. Thanks for putting up your prompt the night before. It fueled my insomnia.
Bonnie
Is Anyone Listening to Tom Friedman?
http://blk1.edublogs.org/
You keyed into something so crucial for me. Thanks.
http://www.andilit.com/?p=264
Just the questions I need to consider today. Thanks
Juliann
http://unwrittenwrites.blogspot.com/2008/09/write-on-wednesday.html
My first time participating! http://wordlily.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/write-on-wednesday-state-of-mind/
have been watching and reading over the past weeks,, but not contributing… today i felt i could not pass up this discussion and thus posted my addition to the current discussion here…
http://whypaisley.com/2008/09/10/while-i-am-waiting/
thank you so much becca for plotting the course on this wonderful writers soul journey and inviting me to join you…..
Thanks for another great prompt. You can find my response here: http://keepthisonthedl.blogspot.com/2008/09/write-on-wednesday.html
Becca, this is a splend, thoughtful and outstanding post. You’ll find my take on it at http://www.themarmeladegypsy.blogspot.com
I do so enjoy these and the community of people I’ve met through this site!
Well, that really made for some creative thinking at the end of a long day, but I felt inspired! Here it is: http://51stories.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/write-on-wednesday-a-state-of-mind/
becca, excellent prompt… have enjoyed reading a few of the responses…
Becca, I love the way you bring together other’s perspectives along with your own experience in these essays — they are always so thoughtful and provocative. I look forward to seeing them every Tuesday night!
As for me, sometimes I wish I could write while I’m on the treadmill. I swear, it’s where I get my best ideas. There’s something about being physically active without having to be particularly attentive to anything else that works for me.
My answer here
happy wednesday!
I have a few things here in response to this week’s prompt – thanks, Becca!
Go to http://westcobich.wordpress.com
And now I have to get to work on a ms. and the reward is coming back to read what everyone is up to! (i have to give up this exclamation point thing. geez.
Wow, I’m amazed and jealous that you are able to write even when life is crazy. Life always takes over for me. I’m lucky to get a blog post written. To write school papers, I have to escape the house. I can only wish I was dedicated enough to writing to actually put my thoughts on paper like you do. Ideas pop through my mind while driving as well. That is where I think the most. Since I started school, I rarely have the radio on anymore because its just distracting and my mind likes the quiet. Even on long rides, I rarely turn it on. Weird.
My first take … Runaway Words
What a great post, Becca. I love this analogy: “ideas popping into your head unbidden, like gifts you can’t wait to open.” A perfect description!
I find that Write on Wednesday rolls into Saturday for me. Better late than never!
http://qugrainne.com/2008/09/13/write-on-wednesday-the-mysterious-zone/
Hi, Becca and all,
What an appropriate post. I’m presently sitting in a motel in Tyler, Texas, with my mother and my cat, and perhaps the only worldly possessions I have left sitting in bags around me. I live on Clear Lake, in the League City/ClearLake Shores/Kemah area of Texas, and Hurricane Ike may well have just taken out my house, and certainly has destroyed my business for a time.
I have no idea what condition my house is in. I suspect that all of my possessions have been ruined. I won’t be able to get back in until I take my 90 year old mother to her sister’s in Kansas City, and then head back to Texas to see what’s left.
How do I rekindle the urge to write? I don’t know. I need to post on my blog, but all I see in my mind are weather charts and hurricane tracks. What will I do? I don’t know. But I’ll share whatever I find with you all!
That is dreadful Shoreacres, my thoughts are with you and hope your house is o.k. On the post topic, this is a great discussion. I agree, lots of my ideas come in transit…I carry a digital dictophone for those ideas. But what I have always found the most perplexing is that sometimes I look back at a piece of writing that I wrote the previous day and I have no recollection of having written it all. Perhaps then that ‘zone’ is sometimes a subconscious one? I do need to relax my brain to write though, sometimes it even makes me fall asleep…which I find endlessly annoying.