(Re)Learning How to Write

July 8, 2009 · by Joanna Paterson · in

I was working on a creative project at the weekend: dreaming up 12 postcards to send to a group of fellow adventurers in various corners of the world.

The idea was to create some postcards from Scotland as part of the mailart project Janice Cartier has organised.

Plus there’s a sub-plot of breaking through some of my own limiting beliefs about art and creativity, including my own ability to produce something vaguely ‘artistic’. I had an idea (from Janice) that I could play with words on the card:

words are art…as a writer your art would look like words….scribbled…typed..

So I started thinking last week about how I could do that: how I could start playing a bit with words when they were scribbled or differently typed to create a look on the page as well as a meaning in the mind.

I didn’t have a clear idea about how to set about this: my writing is basically either typed, fast, or a handwritten scrawl that no-one else but me would ever be able to read.

But I was willing to experiment – there is something about the way the project has been set up that makes it easy to experiment and play.

So I got myself a selection of pens, crayons and charcoal and sat down one afternoon last week in a cafe, and started to write.

Except this time it was different. I wasn’t writing fast.  I was writing slow.

I wasn’t writing sentences, paragraphs, rapid thoughts and fast flowing ideas.  I was writing one word, over and over.

Source

“Source“, was the word I was playing with, but to be honest, the choice of word didn’t matter.

It was something that was happening as I wrote, really wrote, slowly, by hand, that was changing things.

It was something to do with:

  • Writing slowly, and paying attention to each and every letter
  • Noticing, exploring, expanding and turning upside down the meaning of the word, as  I scattered the letters across the page
  • Feeling the act of writing: my fingers getting inky, the smudges of charcoal, the pressure of crayon on the page
  • Allowing the letters to stretch, scrawl, play: noticing that the swoops and swirls got bigger, wilder as I let myself fall further into the patterns of the letters, further away from the literal meaning
  • Enjoying the flow state of experimenting for look, style, feel, without any sense of what was the ‘right way’ to do it

I had the feeling that I was learning something important about the act of writing.  Its playful dimension.  The look of the letters on the page.  The feel of the pen moving.  The crazy smudges of ink.

I was recognising how far I removed I am from that flow state, that pleasure, that creative experimental delight, when I just sit here and type, fast.

And sensing that learning, (re)learning how to write, might also mean leaving room for the possibility of writing in swoops and swirls.

Playfully.  Messily. Slow.

Does changing the medium change the way you feel about writing?  Have you ever found that to open up a new sense of what’s possible?