How to Write When You Don't Feel Like It by Rachel Jendrzejewski
PART 3. MECHANIZATION
“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” -Anne Carson
So now I’ll share just a few little tools that I find useful when I’ve gone through transition and relaxation but am still not feeling it. I think what these tools have in common is that they’re responsive. I don’t feel like I need to muster the energy to initiate or invent; I can just sort of mechanically respond. Once again, I want to invite us into writing without needing to know where it’s going. Even if you have a specific project underway that you’re trying to tackle, put it aside and trust you’ll come back around to it eventually.
GENERATION, SELECTION, SEQUENCE. This first tool is really just a framework that you can apply in different ways to different processes. I learned this phrase “Generation, Selection, Sequence” from Erik Ehn, my grad school mentor, who regularly offered it in thinking about both short exercises and full scripts.
Exercise: Think back to the journaling, freewriting, and lists from the last section; these are all modes of generation. To take a next step, look back on what you wrote and (quickly, impulsively) circle any words or phrases that are jumping out to you right now. Voilà, selection. Let these words or phrases that you have selected become prompts for your next freewrite or launch you into other kinds of writing. For example, maybe a kind of character or figure came up for you, so your next exercise becomes describing them or unpacking something they could be saying. Maybe the image of your childhood home came up, so now you want to pull that out and start fictionalizing it, changing details—like what happens if you describe that space, but imagine it with different colors, different furniture, different people in it? These are just a few ways that you can begin to play with some of that splat material. Selection also can mean straight up editing; maybe your freewriting led to the beginning of a score or scene or poem or some lyrics, so then you want to select out the bits that are working for you and refine or expand them. The last part, “sequence,” generally refers to the ordering of sections or scenes—moving things around and refining until the whole structure is set. This might happen with a specific goal or outline in mind; it also can happen in a more intuitive, emergent way.
REARRANGEMENTS. So, following the 2016 U.S. presidential election (not unlike right now, in 2020), I was having a really hard time writing. Like no words were available, it just didn’t feel possible, nothing felt adequate or useful. I was so full of grief and rage. As a truly private therapeutic practice at first, I started taking transcripts of speeches by 45 and rearranging the words into something I liked better—new speeches, long epic poems. My rule was that I had to use every single word from the original text and could not add any new words. It was simultaneously mindless (just pushing words around) and also tedious hard work (how long it took, the ugliness of the material of that language, how frustrating and challenging but also ultimately transformative it felt to give those words new meaning through a different order). I found it super satisfying and actually wound up with some new writing that I shared a little more publicly.
Of course, you can rearrange any kind of found text—it doesn’t need to be a cringeworthy speech. You can transcribe passages from books, collect language from advertisements, revisit your journal entries... there are all kinds of possibilities. For me, this process definitely is inspired by cut-up techniques, the Fluxus movement, as well as e rasure and blackout poetry... all of which I won’t get into here, but I do totally recommend going down some of these rabbit holes to find other strategies for getting into a similarly satisfying mechanical/responsive zone.
Exercise: You obviously can make up your own rules here... but I thought I’d share my personal preferred approach to rearranging text. I don’t want to throw super ugly source material at you—you can decide what kind of language you want to tackle; so for the sake of having some benign test material, here’s an article about composting.
So first, copy and paste the text from the article into a new document on your computer. Delete any images or ads, remove hyperlinks, etc. so that you only have the language of the article (copying from a print-friendly view can save time on this front). This is your material. You can start pulling from it as is, but I personally like to plug it into software that alphabetizes all the words, so that your bank of language is devoid of the original source’s meaning. Here is a free online tool that will alphabetize for you! Once you’ve sorted your language there, bring it back into your document. I like to start a new section well above or below that material, or you can start a separate doc, whatever feels least cumbersome to you... and then just begin to collage the words. Start pulling and grouping them together, like magnetic poetry on a refrigerator, and see what happens. You can be strict like me and commit to somehow using every word from the original source, or you can just work with as many words as you like until you feel like the new piece is “done.”
For some examples of how this process has played out for me: A few rearranged speeches from 2016-2017 are available to my Patreon supporters here and here; but actually, one of my earliest pieces to come out of this process came well before the 2016 election and involved working with some very pleasant source material—an essay about funnels by the brilliant Alisha Adams, which I rearranged into a short play.
COLLABORATION. This subject should be a whole class unto itself, so I won’t spend a ton of time on it here; but I frequently work collaboratively with other artists, and it’s worth noting that these relationships can feel like saving graces in stretches when I don’t really feel like writing. Having someone(s) with whom you can bounce material back and forth—whether you’re both writers, or it’s you writing and they’re working in other disciplines—can be a lovely way to fuel the writing energy. This way of working also connects you with another human, which has lots of other benefits for writers who often work in isolation, especially if this work is happening in a pandemic! Collaboration can take so many different forms. I personally think it’s best when you and your collaborator(s) come up with a working process together based on your unique practices, shared interests, impulses, intentions, etc. One way I often work with other artists—especially choreographers, musicians, and visual artists—is through a kind of conversation between our disciplines. For example, with my collaborator Terry Hempfling, we’ll get into a studio together (or if that’s not possible, she might send me video) and I’ll watch her dance and write in response. Then I share that writing with her, she responds with more movement, and we start amassing material and a shared vocabulary that way. In multiple instances, this process has led to creating full performances together—essentially by way of “Generation, Selection, Sequence,” as we start layering and arranging material that we’ve created (usually in tandem with talking about theoretical, social, or conceptual questions we’re kicking around).
Exercise: I suspect many of you are familiar with this famous Surrealist game, or variations thereof; if not, here and here are some context. For a deeper dive from a writerly perspective, check out this amazing piece by the marvelous Mia Chung. This game can serve as a fun way to get a new collaborative conversation going. With a collaborator, play a few rounds of Exquisite Corpse in the medium(s) of your choosing. Maybe you both draw, maybe you both write, or maybe you experiment with alternating based on your respective practices. Afterwards, talk about what felt connected or synchronistic about each of your contributions, what surprised or challenged you, and what it could look like to translate this process into the development of a larger piece.