Strictly Writing: Tobin Simon

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Writing the Mind Alive Part 2

Last Wednesday seven women gathered in a cottage on the edge of a frosted wood. No, its not the beginning of a fairy story, we really did. The class I teach would have been disrupted by builders re-roofing our house so we swapped venue and met at the home of one of my students. That she lives in a Victorian cottage surrounded by woodland, and the world was lit by a heavy coating of frost simply helped. We were starting the proprioceptive writing together and it seemed an auspicious mood in which to begin.

I lit the candle, feeling a little silly, as though I was trying to add some false solemnity to what was, after all, merely a bit of scribbling amongst friends. Then we put Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the CD player and began. There was the usual short spell of kerfuffling – whispers, sneaked biscuits and giggling, and then the music pealed out loudly over all of us, surprising us. We turned it down, picked up our pens and wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote.

There was a hush over the class I’d never encountered before. They are all talented writers and more than capable of getting down to work but usually there’s a constant low hubbub of biscuit snaffling and sighing, pen chewing and trotting off to the loo. The directive was simple: listen to the voice inside your head and write down what it is saying. Process what it says, in a kindly, inquisitive manner, probe what it really means. Keep listening and recording, not directing.

Today there was a consistency in both their concentration and their energy. It seemed easier for them than usual. And it certainly was for me. The breakthrough was the use of the Proprioceptive Question (I know. Such a pompous title but if we ignore the surface bluster and dig at what’s underneath, it’s gold.) The question you keep repeating is: What do I mean by X and you ask it every time you get even the tiniest hiccup or glitch in the flow of your thoughts.

This to me is the core of Proprioceptive writing’s magic: it’s the Editor gently inquiring of the Creator: Can I help? I’d like to help. The Ed is a right old School Monitor. Gets all uppity if it hasn’t a job to do. And Very Doesn’t Hold with the Creator romping around adding bits here and there and jumping ahead ten scenes because scene 13 is more fun to write than scene 4. The Ed stamps on such frolics, with a Can’t Play Won’t Play attitude and refuses to co-operate. The result: writer’s block. But here, the trick is to make Ed and Creator bezzy mates from the outset. It works.

Occasionally I looked up from my page, feeling guilty that I was getting so much from it myself when I was there to teach. But all heads were down, all pens were moving at exactly the same pace. We were writing to the rhythm of Bach’s music, which matches the rhythm of our own pulse, our heart rate: he composes to the rhythm of our bodies. So body and mind were in harmony. How often can we say that about writing? How often are we cramped in a chair, trying to ignore backache and numb thighs and twinges of RSI? Forgive me if this sounds whacko, but the energy in the room was clear – as if made of crystal or bright water. And the candle? I glanced at it once or twice when the Teacher in me broke concentration to see if everyone was OK. Its light was soft and intense – a simple focus back to the job in hand. So if you try it, don’t skip or customise it. Light that candle, play that Bach, listen attentively to the voice inside and copy down what it's saying. Prepare to be delighted.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Writing-Mind-Alive-Proprioceptive-Authentic/dp/0345438582/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295993915&sr=1-1

Writing The Mind Alive

All my writing life I’ve been aware of two halves of the writing self.

First, there’s the Creator who spools out material with nonchalant bliss. On a bus! At 3 am! In a café with a friend doing the same across a wobbly, latte-stained table. This is the writing self I’ve always loved best. The one who pencils eight-inch arrows across a first draft and scrawls an additional paragraph in the margin, tailspinning the plot and setting it alight. Or can’t find the right word, so contentedly scribbles, ‘Furry, leg at each corner, kneads your belly in front of Relocation, Relocation – whattheycalledagain? – never mind. Protag has one that gets lost, and, whilst trying to find it, she stumbles upon a secret community living in a derelict house on the island. Oh yeah: cat!’

Then there’s the Editor, who I mulishly admit to feeling more at home with. She’s a scrawny, bespectacled beast, whose eyes gleam as she lifts her red pen (which she probably wears on a chain round her neck, prissy mare.) ‘I don’t think we really meant to say, ‘At home with?’ did we dear? With whom I feel at home is correct but I’ll allow the vernacular if you argue well for it.’ To be fair, she’s also the one who culls the Creator’s glutted draft with the zeal of Gillian MacKeith tossing pork scratchings from an obese family’s larder.

So, I’m used to playing splurge then purge. Or Ed assembling an impeccable skeleton plot then Creator wrapping it with flesh, hair, eyes and body odour. I’m happy to give one top role, then the other, confident that between them they’ll eventually conjure goods that are, for the most part, presentable. Half way what I was after.

But in all these years I’d never strayed upon a writing practise that melds the two. Same page, same time. That’s as impossible as, I dunno, asking Clegg and Cameron to run a country together and make a fair fist of it. Not happening. But this union is the basis of a book I recently read, on the advice of a fellow (highly productive and successful) writer. The book is called Writing the Mind Alive and the concept of running Editor and Creator together has the off-putting name: proprioceptive writing. When I mentioned it to my students, they knew all about proprioception. One, a teacher turned masseuse, said it means using right and left sides of the brain simultaneously, typically by using right and left hands together. As in massage or playing the piano.

Most writers are acquainted with morning pages or automatic writing - some process where you write without stopping to think. In proprioceptive writing you write freely but pause and ask questions of the creator: What did you mean by that? This way, the editor gets her fix of intervention but the creator is allowed continuous flow. Both are gainfully employed, their monkey egos simultaneously satisfied. The author of Writing The Mind Alive has simple rules. You play Bach. (Bit strict on that. It must be Bach because his music simulates our pulse rate in relaxed, receptive mode.) You light a candle – to remind you this is a ritual that works best done daily. You write for half an hour, no more. You continue to ask the question: What did I mean by x?

Ok, it’s a little whacky, but leave the room please ladies and gentlemen if you have no truck with whacko ideas from time to time. I’m a proprioceptive novice (hah – those are words I’d not even have understood this time last year) but I intend to light that candle, play that funky harpsichord and write and ask, write and ask, until Creator and Editor are coiled together in blissful, fruitful union.

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Welcome to our blog. We are a varied group of writers - published and aspiring; poets, short-story creators and novelists - with one thing in common: an enduring love for the craft of writing. A love which requires great resilience in the face of recurrent self-doubt, writer's block and rejection. In the face of the obsessive checking of emails, inch high dust and burnt dinners. In the face of a gamut of RSI injuries and writer's bottom. But a love that repays itself ten times over with those sparkling seconds of elation when finally, the right prose unfolds, like a quick-footed jive or seamless Cha Cha Cha. That's when we trust once again the voice in our heads that urges... "Keeeeep writing!"