Boisterously inspired at iowa writers’ workshop

“Write What You Don’t Know” gets a huge vote of confidence

I've just returned from Iowa City, where I held a masterclass for graduate students in the University of Iowa Writing Program and was guest guru in an undergraduate class. Verdict: the students were "boisterously inspired" and one even called it "epic." Which is pretty epic, but I like "boisterous" better: unruly and energetic and excited and devil-may-care.

The name "Imaginative Storm" is all about being boisterous: it’s a whirlwind of images and words disrupting rationality and order.  It’s messy. It’s irreverent. It’s rebellious. Instead of "write what you know," we say "write what you don't know." Instead of "try to write well," we say "don't try to write well!" And there I was, saying these things at the most highly respected writing workshop in the US.

We started by writing to the prompt "I Effing Hate . . ." One person, as he told me later, wrote "I hate writing!"—though he loves having written. I remember my sister Artemis Cooper, a highly respected biographer, saying the same thing many years ago. I thought it was so sad, to hate the thing you do all day long--but when I became a writer myself I understood it completely. The angst, the stuttering lack of inspiration, the vicious inner critic, the sheer slog of trying to get down what's in your head and the frustration when it refuses to come out right. But you accept the tradeoff because, somehow, writing has become what you do.

I can report that for myself, the Imaginative Storm practice of writing what I don't know, and not trying to write well, has taken away the angst and the self-doubt and the slog. Ten years ago, if I'd set myself this Substack, I'd have been tearing my hair out all week and squirming on tenterhooks once I hit Publish. Now, it's fun: I get to find out what I think.

I was always the straight-A student who got things right. I think it's common for people like me to suffer this angst around writing. We feel that because we're "intelligent" what we write ought to be "good," and that's a huge burden when you're creating something out of nothing.

But academic intelligence is only one small subset of intelligence (as I realized, a little late in the day, when I fell in love with a woodworker). For writers, it's much less important than imaginative intelligence.

Isn't it weird the way we encourage small children to express their imaginative intelligence, and then as they make their way through school it's gradually beaten out of them? (If you're the exception to this statement, lucky you.) You've probably heard people say, "I'm not a very imaginative person." Or, "I'm not very creative." That may be so, but is that nature or nurture? I think it's usually nurture--or rather, lack of nurture.

You can nurture your imaginative intelligence in all kinds of simple ways: finding shapes in clouds and stars, playing silly games, building cairns on the trail, talking to your cat. If you'd like to get inspired as the Iowa students were, here are the two prompts I set, both from Write What You Don't Know:

1. Set a timer for 2 minutes and write a list of things you really hate: things that other people love or don't even notice. (Stay away from politics and ideology; you’ve probably got those rants well formed already.) Then, choose one of those things, set a timer for 5 minutes, and write a rant about how much you effing HATE it!

2. Call up a memory, something that happened in a particular place. Set a timer for 10 minutes and consider two questions: What wasn't there? And, what was damaged?

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