(estimated. time: 60-75 minutes)
You already know one way to freewrite (remember day 2?). Today you’ll learn another way, one that harnesses the power of divergent and convergent thinking to help you invent and develop ideas for anything you want to write, from stories to poems to essays.
Prep: (adapted from a Lynda Barry exercise)
Draw a little dot on a page. Then draw a tight spiral around the dot, going around and around. Get the lines of the spiral as close together as possible. Keep drawing the spiral for three or four minutes. For some people, it’s an easy way to gather your attention onto the page. For me, it helps me access a daydream state—a state that’s good for my writing—though I can’t explain why it works. Here’s an example:
Read:
Let’s talk about divergent thinking. You may not be familiar with the term, but if you’ve ever practiced brainstorming, you’re familiar with the method. Divergent thinking is the process of generating a bunch of ideas.
The opposite of divergent thinking is convergent thinking. This is the process of coming up with a single idea.
Divergent thinking is commonly associated with creativity. But the truth is that you need both approaches to commit a creative act.
If all you ever practiced was divergent thinking, you would come up with idea after idea after idea . . . but never select one and see it through. On the other hand, if all you ever practiced was convergent thinking, you would have a famine of ideas.
The creative process moves back and forth between divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Typically, the creative thinker comes up with a bunch of ideas before selecting one and running with it. The partnership of divergent and convergent thinking doesn’t just happen at the beginning of a project, by the way; it can happen again and again during a project. For instance, let’s say you’re going to write a story. You come up with a bunch of story ideas and then you pick one. You’re off and running . . . and then your character comes to a decision point at the bottom of page 1. What are they going to do? Time for you to engage in more divergent and convergent thinking to figure it out.
Cool, you might be thinking, but how do I actually do that?
Peter Elbow, legendary writing teacher from the University of Massachusetts, developed a strategy for flitting back and forth between these modes of thought. He wrote about this strategy in his book Writing with Power. Below is a relevant excerpt from chapter 7, “The Open-Ended Writing Process.”
I think of the open-ended writing process as a voyage in two stages: a sea voyage and a coming to new land. For the sea voyage, you are trying to lose sight of land—the place you began. Getting lost is the best source of new material. In coming to new land you develop a new conception of what you are writing about—a new idea or vision—and then you gradually reshape your material to fit this new vision. The sea voyage is a process of divergence, branching, proliferation, and confusion; the coming to land is a process of convergence, pruning, centralizing, and clarifying.
To begin the sea voyage, do a nonstop freewrite that starts from wherever you happen to be. Most often you just start with a thought or a feeling or a memory that seems for some reason important to you. But perhaps you have something in mind for a possible piece of writing: perhaps you have some ideas for an essay; or certain images stick in mind as belonging in a poem; or certain characters or events are getting ready to make a story. You can also start by describing what you wish you could end up with. Realize of course that you probably won’t. Just start writing.
The open-ended writing process is ideal for the situation where you sense you have something to write but you don’t quite know what. Just start writing about anything at all. If you have special trouble with that first moment of writing—that confrontation with a blank page—ask yourself what you don’t want to write about and start writing about it before you have a chance to resist. First thoughts. They are very likely to lead you to what you are needing to write.
Keep writing for at least ten or twenty or thirty minutes, depending on how much material and energy you come up with. You have to write long enough to get tired and get past what’s on the top of your mind. But not so long that you start pausing in the midst of your writing. (my note: When he wrote this chapter, Elbow believed that freewriting should be continuous, without any pauses. Later in his career, he changed his mind: Occasional brief pauses to gather your thoughts during freewriting are fine—as long as you maintain a general flow of momentum. What you don’t want is a pause between every sentence or even every paragraph. If the flow becomes herky-jerky, it’s no longer freewriting.)
Then stop, sit back, be quiet, and bring all that writing to a point. That is, by reading back or just thinking back over it, find the center or focus or point of those words and write it down in a sentence. This may mean different things: you can find the main idea that is there; or the new idea that is trying to be there; or the imaginative focus or center of gravity—an image or object or feeling; or perhaps some brand new thing occurs to you now as very important—it may even seem unrelated to what you wrote, but it comes to you now as a result of having done that burst of writing. Try to stand out of the way and let the center or focus itself decide to come forward. In any event, don’t worry about it. Choose or invent something for your focus and then go on. The only requirement is that it be a single thing. Skip a few lines and write [the center or focus or point of the freewrite] down. Underline it or put a box around it so you can easily find it later. (Some people find it helpful to let themselves write down two or three focusing sentences.)
If this center of gravity is a feeling or an image, perhaps a mere phrase will do: “A feeling that something good will happen” or “Mervyn the stuffed monkey slumped under the dining room table.” But a complete sentence or assertion is better, especially if the focus is an idea or thought or insight. Try, that is, to get more than “economics” or “economic dimension”—since those words just vaguely point in a general direction—and try for something like “there must be an economic reason for these events.”
You have now gone through a cycle that consists of nonstop writing and then sitting back to probe for the center. You have used two kinds of consciousness: immersion, where you have your head down and are scurrying along a trail of words in the underbrush, and perspective, where you stand back and look down on things from a height and get a sense of shape and outline.
Now repeat this cycle. Use the focus you just wrote down as the springboard for a new piece of nonstop writing. There are various ways in which you can let it bounce you into new writing. Perhaps you just take it and write more about it. Or perhaps that doesn’t seem right because what you already wrote has finished an idea and the focusing sentence has put the lid on it. If you wrote more about it, you would just be repeating yourself. In this case, start now with what comes next: the next step, the following thing, the reply, the answering salvo. Perhaps “what comes next” is what follows logically. Perhaps the next thing is what comes next in your mind even though it involves a jump in logic. Perhaps the next thing is a questioning or denial of what you have already written: arguments against it, writing in an opposite mood, or writing in a different mode (from prose to poetry). Stand out of the way and see what happens.
Whatever kind of jump it is, jump into a second burst of nonstop writing for however long you can keep it up. Long enough to get tired and lose track of where you started; not so long that you keep pausing and lose momentum. And then, again, stop and come out from the underbrush of your immersion in words, attain some calm and perspective, and find the summing up or focus or center of gravity for this second piece of writing.
The sea voyage consists of repeating this cycle over and over again. Keep up one session of writing long enough to get loosened up and tired—long enough in fact to make a bit of a voyage and probably to pass beyond what happened to be in mind and in mood [at the beginning of the session] . . .
As you change modes from writing to focusing and back to writing and back to focusing, practice letting the process itself decide what happens next—decide, for example, whether your focusing sentence springboards you into a new treatment of the same material, into a response to that material or into some other new topic or mode that “wants” to come next. If it sounds a bit mystical to say “Let it decide,” I don’t mean to rule out hard conscious thinking. “Letting it decide” will often mean realizing you should be rigorously logical at this point in the writing cycle. As you practice the open-ended writing process, you will get better at feeling what kind of step needs to be taken at any given point. The main thing is not to worry about doing it right. Just do it a lot.
As you engage in this sea voyage, invite yourself to lose sight of what you had in mind at the beginning, invite digressions, new ideas, seeds falling from unexpected sources, changes of mind. You are trying to nurse your thoughts, perceptions and feelings through a process of continual transformation . . .
The sea voyage is most obviously finished when you sight new land—when you get a trustworthy vision of your final piece of writing. You see that it’s an argument and where it is going; or you see it is a poem and feel the general shape of it.
From WRITING WITH POWER
Create:
Freewrite in this “loop the loop” style for at least 45 minutes. Don’t put too much pressure on the starting point. Just pick something that makes you feel the itch of curiosity or interest—you don’t even have to know why—and go.
Reflect:
List the conditions for your writing session today (e.g. morning, easy chair+lapdesk, coffee, children upstairs, etc.) Which conditions are working for you? Which conditions are working against you?
Regarding this style of freewriting—What worked for you? What didn’t work so well?
What did you learn about writing, or about yourself as a writer today?
Put an X in the box for day 6 and log the time you took with today’s session.