Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
—Anthony Burgess
Practicing with our “content mind” is great fun, and without well-developed content skills, such as imagination and curiosity, we can't come up with ideas and material for pieces of writing. From here on, though, we’re going to set aside all consideration of content and focus entirely on language. We'll follow the lead of coaches in sports and music, and concentrate only on one set of skills: those needed to develop our “word mind.” In this chapter I introduce you to some basic practices, beginning with one that will reacquaint you with your word mind.
Begin with freewriting, as in the exercise from Chapter 2. Get your pen moving across the page, or your fingers across the keyboard, without stopping. Remember to relax; there’s no rush.
Once you feel comfortable, see if you can shift your mental focus: Turn your attention away from what you are saying to the words you are using. At first you may find this difficult; that’s fine. Just keep trying to bring your mind back to words. You may also find that your writing stops making sense; that’s fine, too. (If a great idea occurs to you while you work, however, by all means write it down!) You may find that you stop writing sentences altogether and move instead into listing words.
Try as best you can to keep from judging the words that come to you. There are no right or wrong answers in this practice. Instead, as you write, listen to your words; pay attention to what you hear. Afterwards take a moment or two to reflect, on paper if you wish, about what happened when you did the exercise.
Sometimes people fall in love with this practice right away. Other times they may say, “That was hard!” You, too, may find it difficult. If that’s the case, don’t give up! Chances are very good that you have never tried to write this way before, with an awareness of words. If your inner critic speaks up (What boring words you have! How could you ever become a writer?), just ignore it. Instead, simply notice the words you use, without judging them: Oh, look at that but and that and … and here’s another but … ! Let your curiosity and sense of wonder kick in: I wonder where the word and comes from, anyway? Remember that this practice is designed simply to start you on a path of awakening to words, not to produce “great writing.”
Most of the time, when we write, we are focused on what we want to say; we’re using our content minds exclusively. And most of the time, when we write, our word minds are functioning on automatic. If we want to get better at using words, our first step is to bring into conscious awareness the part of our mind that gives us those words, even if we’re not happy with what it gives us.
Remember, too, that writing is a dance between content and craft, between the content mind and the word mind. We need to know how to use both parts of our minds when we write and rewrite; we need to know how to move back and forth between them; we need to know how to handle those occasional ecstatic moments when both parts are working simultaneously. To engage in this dance of writing, we need to learn how to let words lead, some of the time. And to let words lead, we need, above all, to listen to them.
As you do Basic Practice #1, you may find it difficult, at first, to hear the words you use. We all have to process so many written words every day that we tend to rely on speed reading, or skimming. At first, then, you may find it hard to slow down enough to notice your words.
Keep trying. If you feel that your thoughts are racing, make a conscious decision to move your pen, or your fingers, more slowly. As you do that, you will be able to bring your full attention to your words, at least once in a while.
And as you keep turning your attention deliberately to your words, an amazing thing will happen: Your writer’s ear will wake up. Rather than speeding through your frantic mind, your words will linger, letting you hear and appreciate their individual qualities, their meanings, their sounds, their rhythms.
The writer’s ear reminds us that words are not merely marks on a page; they are living beings with their own identities, their own characteristics; they are made of breath and sound, as well as meaning. When we wake up our writer’s ear, words come alive in our minds; and when we use our writer’s ear to compose sentences and paragraphs, our words will come alive in the minds of our readers. Our brains and nervous systems still work the way they did millennia ago, when our ancestors lived in oral cultures, without writing. And despite modern technology, most people retain an “inner ear” for language, even on the page. They can hear the sound of a writer’s voice; sometimes they even subvocalize, moving their lips to shape the words they are reading, without making sounds. When these words come alive, full of breath and sound and energy, readers will respond to their power.
Every skilled writer has a highly trained writer’s ear, whether that ear has been trained unconsciously, through reading, or through deliberate practice, or a combination of both. Our writer’s ear is the organ of the word mind. Our writer’s ear can be tuned into the meaning of words, as well as their music; it can tell us how best to arrange our words into sentences that will have the effect we intend on our readers. Throughout this book, I will be encouraging you to make conscious use of your writer’s ear. You may want to take a few minutes now to repeat Basic Practice #1, with the intention of using your writer’s ear.
Most writers keep notebooks, and you’ll need one for the practices in this book. You can certainly practice on the computer, if you like, but it’s still a good idea to have a small notebook to carry around with you. A portable notebook lets you practice anytime you have a few minutes to spare. A notebook, portable or not, lets you keep all your practicing in one place; a notebook makes it easy for you to read through your practicing to decide what you might want to work on right now. Most of all, a notebook gives you an easy way to collect words.
If you do the waking up the word mind practice on a regular basis, you will notice that you are paying more attention to words, both the words you come up with and the words that come your way from other people. You can, if you like, make a conscious decision not only to notice these words, but to collect the ones that appeal to you. Any time you hear or read a word that calls to you—from conversation or radio, books or magazines or advertising, or anywhere at all—write that word down in your notebook. You have now taken the first step towards making that word your own.
As with many endeavors, this first step may be the hardest for you. It takes a little bit of extra effort—not all that much, really—to get out your notebook and write down some words. But, as with any practice, once you get into the habit of doing this, it becomes very easy. And the more you do it, the more your mind will begin to work the way the minds of skilled writers do.
Good writers are people who love language; one of the reasons they write is that it gives them the opportunity to spend a lot of time with words. So they notice and collect words all the time, exercising and strengthening their word minds in the process. You can do this, too. In the next section you'll have several opportunities to practice this collecting. For now, try this:
Listen to the radio or television, or someone speaking, without paying attention to the content of the words you hear. Instead, use your writer’s ear to focus on the words themselves. Write down any words that stand out for you.
When we read, most of the time, we are paying attention to content. What ideas is this writer articulating? What story is she telling? What will happen next? We are engaged with the material with our content minds. But if we want to become better writers, we also have to read with our word minds. To do that, we need to slow down and savor the words on the page.
When we read more slowly, when we really listen to a writer’s words and sentences, perhaps even taking the time to read them out loud, an amazing thing happens: Those words, those phrases, those sentence rhythms enter our ears and lodge themselves in our writer’s brain. There they become part of a storehouse of language techniques we can then draw on when we write.
This process happens largely below the level of conscious thought. We can learn even more effectively, though, when we actively apprentice ourselves to a favorite writer, by copying out, word-for-word, passages from her work, or by giving some of our practice time to writing imitations of her sentences. Long before anyone ever thought of creative writing courses, aspiring writers learned their craft by choosing a published writer as a model and imitating his work.
Perhaps you think that learning this way is a form of plagiarism; I can assure you that it is not. In any field—ballet, baseball, art—people learn by finding models of excellence and imitating them. Dr. Ericsson, the preeminent expertise researcher, assures us that we are all “prewired to imitate.”1… prewired to imitate. K. Anders Ericsson, quoted in Coyle, p. 80. I’m quite convinced that aspiring writers often flounder in part because the practice of imitation, a learning tool of inestimable value, has been withheld from them.
So, as you read your favorite writer, I strongly encourage you to spend some time noticing how she uses language. The practices in the rest of this book will teach you some specific things to look for: what kinds of choices this writer makes about words, what choices she makes about constructing sentences. The more you develop, through practice, your understanding of how words work, the more you will be able to learn about sentence craft from the work of writers you love.
And then, take some time to imitate a sentence or two, or an entire paragraph. If you like, for every practice in the rest of this book, you can examine a passage by a favorite writer to discover the choices he made in that particular aspect of sentence-making. Then try doing the practice the way you imagine this writer might do it.
Read a passage from a favorite writer out loud and listen to the words. What do you notice about how this writer uses language?
Choose a writer whose work is, for you, a model of excellence. This is your choice, one that should not be dictated by current academic/literary taste or the latest bestsellers. Copy out a passage from a work by your chosen writer, and then, as best you can, imitate those sentences. You will get the most out of this exercise if you follow it with the next basic practice.
In addition to learning through imitation, humans also learn through reflection. If you like, take time during your practice sessions to think over, in writing, what happened as you did each exercise. What did you notice? What questions are coming up for you about language and your use of it? What are you learning? Reflecting in this way gives you a place to bring to consciousness, and to preserve, what you are learning right now about words and how you want to use them.
This reflection practice also helps you stay in charge of your own learning journey. It helps you see what steps you have taken so far on your path in the world of sentence craft. It helps you ask yourself questions or articulate half-formed thoughts. And it helps you see where you might want or need to go next.
If you don’t want to reflect after each practice, then try to do it at the end of a practice session. Ask yourself questions, rather than make judgments. To write My writing stinks. I’ll never learn how to do this is to put boulders in your own way. Instead, write about what you have been learning, and what you might want to learn next. You will probably be amazed at how intelligent your learner’s intuition is and what good suggestions it has for you.
I consider reflection on learning to be an essential practice, one that helps you integrate material and move forward, so at the end of each chapter you’ll find a reminder to take some time to reflect.
Before we turn to more specific practices, you may wish to reflect on where you are now as a writer and what you would like to learn or how you can best engage in writing practice. What are your particular strengths as a writer? What skills do you feel you most need to learn and develop?
You can do the practices in this book anytime on your learning journey, and you need not set aside hours in which to do them. Think about how you can best find a place for practice in your life. If you are ready to take on the discipline of deliberate practice, then daily practicing is essential. But it’s definitely possible to improve your skills, even if your circumstances don’t allow you the time for rigorous daily practice. You can take ten minutes here, or fifteen minutes there; the more often you can take time, even a little bit of time, to practice, the better. And, as with other kinds of practicing, you need to give your brain a chance to assimilate your new learning. You may find that practicing before you go for a walk, or before you make dinner, gives you an opportunity for assimilation.
What matters above all is the doing of the practices, and the reflecting on them. Writing, like any other craft, is learned by doing. You can read about it, or talk about it, all you want, but your abilities will never improve if you don’t exercise them.
Finding time to practice may mean choosing to give up something else. But because waking up and exercising the word mind are so inherently pleasurable, I suspect that after a while you will begin to look forward to your practice sessions, and to feel that doing writing practice is its own reward.
After all, where else in our lives do we get the chance to practice making magic?
1… prewired to imitate. K. Anders Ericsson, quoted in Coyle, p. 80.