Vanessa Saunders
WRITING AS A SOMATIC PROCESS
To expand your approach to writing prose sentences, practice typing out pages from writers you admire. Doing a page every day helps me get an understanding of how different kinds of prose feel under my fingers. I also get the chance to see how it looks on my Microsoft Word document. I have found that typing out the work of others usually opens up my creative flow. Say, for instance, I am typing out a page of Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Once I get into the flow of writing, it is easy for me to transfer the physical feeling of Gertrude Stein’s sentences onto my own vision. You can think of it as a warm-up. For example, I used to play competitive soccer. You don’t want to start the game with dry, cold muscles. Warming up the hands, as well as paying attention to the feeling of the language, can help prepare you for an effective writing session. It can also help you get into the flow when you are stuck, blocked, or exhausted.
While I write, I often pay attention to the elements of prosody mentioned by Toni Morrison in her introduction to Tar Baby: rhythm, rest, silence, and inflection. It is one thing to recognize these elements in a sentence and understand how they impact the reader’s experience. It is quite another to feel it through the body. Rhythm, for example, is something that can be palpably felt when typing passages out. Writing is often thought of as a mental process and less conceived as a physical process. Much like Jack Spicer encourages poets to think of themselves as a radio receiving a signal, this exercise shows that style can be experienced in the body as well as the mind and encourages writers to get out of their heads when they write.
The joy and the drama of a writing life means that you will never stop improving your craft. For me, copying out pages from the books of different authors helps me push myself. Each writer has a different approach to integrating rhythm, rest, silence, and inflection into their style. In a single week, I might type out passages from Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Kelly Link, Anton Chekhov, and Octavia Butler. Each of these writers has something different to teach me, and every time I sit with some of their work, I take away some new element of style to integrate into my own work. Focusing on those who’ve mastered elements of style different from your own will elevate your craft and help revamp your writing process.
Vanessa Saunders is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her experimental novel, The Flat Woman, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and was published by Fiction Collective Two and University of Alabama Press. Her writing has appeared in magazines such as Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review, Passages North, and other journals. She currently works as a Professor of Practice at Loyola University New Orleans.
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