My eldest son, Nick, is becoming quite the accomplished bluegrass guitarist, his fingers moving ever faster as he flat-picks out melodies and riffs with startling precision and melodic intent—and as primarily a classical guitarist these days, focusing on the more nuanced harmonies and counterpoint of Bach, I’m always deeply impressed. But recently he hit a bit of a plateau and being an engineer, started to become acutely focused on the mechanics of what he was doing by way of hopefully bringing his playing to the next level.
After spending untold hours working on hand position and experimenting with all manner of picks (some made of space-age materials and costing more per ounce than some precious metals), he sought advice from the bluegrass flat picking icon, Bryan Sutton through an online mentorship program. As Nick told me about the advice he received, I was, as is so often the case, drawn to think about the mystery and outright voodoo that so often helps one learn to write.
What Bryan Sutton told him sounded basically like what I’ve told countless writing students, and what I always tell myself—to always work to turn off one part of your brain while you turn on another when you write. In an interview with my former thesis advisor, John Edgar Wideman many years ago now, John spoke of the “lizard or reptilian brain” and how it, along with the “front part of your brain,” gets “a kind of dance going,” trading roles in who is leading. But without both, and especially without that “lizard brain,” writing will remain flat and without soul.
Nick left his video sessions with Sutton thinking a lot more about soul and a lot less about technique.
One thing I’ve advised students to do and something I will often do when writing first drafts is to simply stop using punctuation let your sentences just run together as you focus more on the way words bump up against each other their textures and sounds letting the next word appear in a freely associative way as you work to conjure something valid and moving and meaningful into being (as I just did in this “sentence”). If you can’t think of exactly the right word, put down two or three potential words, knowing you can always go back and fix it later.
While in graduate school, I was also fortunate to work with Peter Elbow, the composition guru and author of the famous Writing Without Teachers, who coined the phrase “free writing.” For Elbow, free writing is perhaps the most essential part of the writing process. When doing it, there is one simple rule. You can’t stop writing for more than a second or two. If you can’t think of what comes next, you simply have to move on, perhaps writing about not knowing what to write, or as he suggests, even just writing the same word over and over until something else appears in your mind, and you’re off again. The idea behind free writing is to use one aspect of the process—that magical moment when words find their way from your brain down through the nerve endings of your arms, on into your fingers and out onto the page. James Joyce famously claimed he could feel his words moving through his wrists, on into his hands when he was writing well.
Elbow was one of the first teachers of writing to formally address the problem of forcing students to first come up with a “thesis statement” before they’ve even written anything, as if ideas reside in our brains without being enmeshed in a complex tangle of language/thought (see my post on Merleau-Ponty for more on that). Elbow and others started calling free writing and other exercises, like mind mapping, “pre-writing” as a way to help students divide the task of coming up with meaningful writing into their different component parts. I tend to avoid that term, however, since it still formalizes the process of piecing together a final draft as the more critical step. In my experience, most of the good stuff comes in those early, messy ramblings where you are freely using words to tease out and harness something just beyond your grasp.
And that sense of searching for something, really making discoveries, figuring something out you had only a vague inkling of when you started, is so essential in writing (and in bluegrass flat-pick riffing). For far too many writers (and artists, musicians, thinkers), I don’t get the sense they are on a soulful enough quest, that we are witnessing them making discoveries that please them immensely and open them up to something utterly new (to them and now to us, too).
Nick came by recently (to show me a new guitar he had just purchased, a lovely Martin—and watch a little of the Super Bowl), and I pulled out my trusty Martin, and we played one of the 3 flat picking tunes I can fumble my way through, “Whiskey Before Breakfast.” When it came time for me to lay down the chords and for Nick to take the lead, I could sense something I haven’t felt in his playing before, an ease and joyfulness, a willingness to take risks and just move on if something didn’t go quite right, and it felt at times as if we were journeying together somehow into the deeper soul of the mere notes we struck. We played for a long time, even missing the opening kickoff.
Apologies for straying away from posting here for the last week or so. I’ve been caught up in the emotion of knowing my book of essays will be published next year, diving headlong into readying a final, more refined, less “free-written” (but not too much less) version to send off to the publisher in the coming months.
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Oh I loved this Arnie! I’ve been trying to understand what has helped me write my best words - and it’s always been when I’ve put headphones in, listened to some evocative music (no lyrics) and sat outside and just let my mind go. And then just as Joyce describes it feels like words find their way to my fingertips. When I read them back I have no clue how they got there, but I tend to like them enough to use them somewhere. To know this technique is a known phenomenon amongst writers is really helpful. And how lucky you are to be able to make music with your son, what a gift. Good luck with your book revisions. Exciting times!
Congrats to Nick as he flat picks his way forward! Your excellent advice culled from your own mentors applies readily to songwriting, of course. As Talking Heads might put it, “Stop making sense “ and you have opened an essential door to the creative process. I am a big fan of punctuation, but absolutely love what happens when you dispense with it. The surrealists understood the essential role of rule breaking. Unlearning is a central ingredient of moving forward.