Allowing Everything...

We are so 'conditioned'  by our family, school, society, and who knows what else - to be nice, to do it 'right', to get the Gold Star, to not make a mistake, to climb to the top of the ladder, to not make waves (Heaven forbid). One of the essential aspects of nurturing the inner writer and our creative source - is to bring awareness to all aspects of our self: the hidden, the suppressed, the 'not nice', and to allow expression for all of these parts of ourselves.

Writing is one of the very best ways to do this in my experience.

Especially if we allow ourselves to write whatever comes up — (please read the excerpt from Writing the Australian Crawl about this.)

And keep writing: do not edit what is on the page as you go along. That can come later. If you start to edit as you write, you are climbing into your 'editor' self, the self that reads. You've done plenty of reading, you don't need practise right now.  Just write. Who cares about spelling mistakes, or the 'perfect' word or phrase? If you start to wonder if you have written the 'right' word, Oh and maybe go check the Thesaurus, or have a look on Google. Hmm. An hour or more spent on thinking rather than writing. By this time you might as well go have a cup of tea, right?

They are not the same things, thinking and writing, they do not come from the same place. You can put your thinking editor cap on at another time - I suggest many days after the actual writing. Perhaps even weeks, or months - or years. The writer is what needs to be nurtured, not the editor, for now, at least!

If you have critical voices clamoring to be heard, well just let them carry on. You don't have to pay attention to them, they are trying to help, but well, they just don't realise that they are actually getting in the way.

And you can play with listening to what the critics are saying:  write in the way they are telling you not to… write as badly as you can, write AWFUL, write boring, write trite, write sentimental, go for it, full on. I've seen extraordinary writing come out of this exercise.

Re: Allowing Everything...

I second that, Sandra. I’ll write down whatever comes to me, good, bad, badder, baddest, rules be damned. And nothing quite equals the feeling of revisiting something that was written weeks ago, dismissing it as utter crap, and just before balling it up and tossing it into the waste can, spotting something – a stray phrase or piece of felicitous wording or the germ of an idea – that makes you say, “Hey, wait a minute…”

I generally give my early drafts or random jottings a month’s stay of execution. If absolutely nothing can be salvaged from them after that, it’s a date with the shredder, me hearties.

Re: Allowing Everything...

I generally give my early drafts or random jottings a month’s stay of execution.

I'd say give it much longer, dear Burt! I've come back to writing of mine YEARS later and had a totally different experience of it. Not to mention it is a way to 'track' the path a little, of one's soul journey.

I still say, for the most part, we are our own worst judges of our writing. If you are a writer, keep everything. All of it. Do with it what you feel inspired to do… keep all the drafts. When you come to getting an editor.. one you really like, let them support you to see what 'fits'.

Sometimes our 'darlings' need to be removed, the pieces we really really love, and they may be extraordinary in and of themselves, but in the context of a novel, or a collection of poems or a piece of creative non-fiction, they may simply not 'work'.

Love!

Sandra

Re: Allowing Everything...

hey! clamoring inner voices, the critic, the judge, all the self-organizing archetypes, these are rich with dialogue, eh?

I love to listen and to reflect on all these inner conflicts (I call this “spelunking” like cave-divers) because this is what guides my hand in what to support, what to prune. I just have to be careful not to take anything literally. My mind is a cave of both wonders and horrors, but distinguishing between fantasy and reality is a discipline, and the painstaking practice practice practice of witnessing sans interpretation falls to me, a life's journey, hopefully culminating somewhere proximate to Truth. At least, that is my goal!

Re: Allowing Everything...

I love it!  and I wish that I had saved all those crappy musings I had written & then torn to shreds — now in retrospect I know there were at least a few good ideas, a gem or 2 hiding in there waiting to be polished.
I'm just getting back into writing again and boy, am I rusty, but I decided this time NOT to tear up & scribble out when writing on paper. I'm just keeping it all this time. 
I use to be embarassed that people would read my thoughts (no, it's not a diary– but my bad writing, my bad ideas).
Not doing it this time around.

Re: Allowing Everything...

Yes, Green Tara - I feel the same way. Right now I'm cursing the fact that I have an old poem in deep storage in Toronto ( I'm in Germany, no trips to Toronto planned for a long time). At least it is there.

Where I have been 'lazy' ( one of the ways our critic stops us from writing) is actually in NOT writing little notes. I think them, and then don't write them down.

I am trying to take a notebook with me everywhere I go.

But, I now use the excuse of it's not the right notebook, too heavy, too expensive, or I fill it up with shopping lists instead. Sigh!

I'm looking forward very much to reading some of your 'bad writing' & bad ideas!

~ Love Sandra

Re: Allowing Everything...

Loved reading this discussion. I have also done the same, tearing up old writing because it felt so worthless and sometimes I have come across something that was accidentally saved that gave me the feeling “Oh, that was nice and I did tear it all up!”

I'd keep in mind Sandra's valuable advice of keeping bad writing…and giving voice to my inner self!

With smiles,
Maria

Re: Allowing Everything...

Welcome to DD, Maria!

It would be great if some of us dig up some old bits of writing we put in the “not good” pile, and post them on the Blogazine. Sadly I suspect we have done what most of us do, throw them away, but if not, I'd love to see them!

I have kept all my diaries, which are really just notebooks. Scribblings of the navel gazing kind. I do not write in them much, and these days hardly at all ( that's something for me to take a look at!).

When I do look at them, at the very least they give me a sense of my journey, where I am in relation to then; and also I can see the 'patterns' of thoughts, ideas, dreams, visions, sadnesses.

I will go peek and see if there is something I dare post up for public consumption. I only have my most recent one, the rest are in deep storage in Toronto.. (I'm in Germany).


Love,

Sandra