If you wrote with me last year, you’ll recognize today’s trick. It’s a good one, I promise.
Our goal today is to select an image—a memory, maybe a fragment of one—and go deep into our unconscious with it. Lynda Barry can help us. There’s something about this exercise—the magic of the spiral, Lynda Barry’s gentle nudges—that always pulls up more details than I thought I could access.
Today’s prompt steals a freewriting technique from my wise friend Erinn Batykefer. In the past, Erinn and I have done a poem-a-days trading prompts back and forth, and Erinn introduced me to Lynda Barry’s work on creativity. Here’s how Erinn explained Lynda Barry to me:
Humans are built to survive. Evolution retains what keeps us alive and weeds out what's extraneous.
So why do humans in every single culture and every era create art? What about images and stories keep us alive on a cellular level? This is one of the questions at the root of Lynda Barry's research into creative practice.
I'll give you the initial image (or a way to dredge one up). Follow the prompts in the video, and when you get to the 9 minutes of writing, be sure to keep your hand continuously moving the whole time, even if you have to write out the alphabet or some other nonsense, till the flow of ideas returns to you. This is critical-- the warm-up exercises, the recitation, and the continuous motion of writing work together to circumvent a part of the brain called Broca's area, which is essentially your inner editor. The practice may seem awkward at first but if you keep trying you will be surprised at the stuff you produce when you're free to make weird associations.
today’s exercise
Make a list of 7-10 memories that haunt you.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re bad—just that they’re snippets of something that happened that you can’t fully remember and also can’t forget. Maybe something you’ve thought about every once in a while and can’t be sure if it really happened or not. (I have a distinct memory of a taxidermied polar bear in my mother’s (fairly small!) childhood bedroom. But that can’t have really happened, can it?)
If you don’t have any good ideas at first, keep listing.
Scan your list, and put stars next to anything that has a little heat in it—anything where you feel like there might more to say or think about.
Pick one to write today, and save the others.
When you’ve got your image, click play on the Lynda Barry video below, and begin your spiral in that image.
a few quick notes
A reminder: what we’re doing in this practice is just writing snippets, rather than producing a poem a day. Maybe a poem emerged out of you today. More likely, you wrote for 9 minutes and discovered a few interesting phrases, maybe an image or a slant of light you’d forgotten. We’ll use those scraps.
And an invitation: if it helps you to share, you’re welcome to post a sentence below, or email me, or put your sentence on twitter or instagram. I’d love to know what you’re up to, and sometimes that little bit of accountability can help you keep going. And if you have a friend you think would benefit from a little more writing in their life, I’d love it if you would share.
I’d love to hear from you. You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).