Is It True Anyone Can Write?
Is It True Anyone Can Write?
The accessibility of writing as art + System 1 and System 2 of the brain & how the former works against us as artists; plus five exercises to get around that
You hear it in different ways at different times in different settings, but the general sentiment that “anyone can write” gets thrown around a lot.
Sometimes that statement is meant to demean or belittle writing as an art form, suggesting that, well, there’s nothing especially difficult about writing. After all, nearly anyone can sit down and do it.
I understand why that sentiment can feel offending to those who toil over piles of pages, wrestling with the persistent mystery of language and its elusive ways. So wily, they are, these words of ours.
But, also … the truth is that writing is a uniquely accessible art from, far more so than many other arts, and that’s something for which I thank my stars daily. If writing hadn’t been so accessible, I’d have found myself excluded for the same reasons I missed out on things like music lessons, dance classes, art camps, and so forth.
To write, all I needed was a pencil and my imagination.
You see, unlike many art forms, writing requires a material investment of next to nothing. No paints or canvasses, no instruments to buy or rent, no pricey lessons or devoted parental attention to monitor practicing.
To write, all we need to do is … start writing.
Eventually, of course, if we want our writing to come alive in the world—to move inside the hearts, minds, bodies of others—we need to find the right words and learn how to arrange them precisely for this effect or that one. This week’s prompt is about how to do that—how to find the right words and place them into patterns so precise they explode with unexpected life.
Achieving those patterns—learning to achieve them more often—is not so much about discipline and persistence, though of course those are helpful contributing factors, yes. But the real secret to finding the right words comes from getting out of our fast-thinking mind, which this week’s exercises will help us to do.
First, though, one more thought on the accessibility of writing, because I am especially reminded of this when it comes to my work with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. When I teach writing inside prison facilities, which I’ve been doing all fall with my advanced fiction class at Moose Lake Prison—where I was last night, in fact—I am gently confronted with the half-truths I tell myself when I make excuses, often logistical and time related, for not writing.
You see, my incarcerated students overcome enormous logistical barriers in order to devote time to their writing—barriers that include lack of computer access, facility lockdowns, book and paper bans, limited or severely restricted library time, and minimal privacy, to name only a few. But when I show up to teach my fiction class at Moose Lake, my students almost always have new work to share with me. Last night, every student had new work. Every student.
Week after week, this humbles me. My students’ devotion to their writing practice—despite constant, significant obstacles—shows me that most of my excuses are in my mind. Most of what gets in my way is me.
Writing is available to me, even in the worst of times, even when I think I can’t, even when I’m depleted and feel exhausted, uninspired, overextended, stressed, uncertain of the future of democracy, bereft over world violence and our decimation of the planet, and ultimately scared that none of it matters anyway.
Even then, writing is available to me.
However … there is a marked downside to the amazing accessibility of creative writing.
That downside is glut.
Writing as an art form suffers from a glut of words growing constantly thicker and less penetrable in our age of clickbait and smart phones and social media and influencers and the “content” and “creator” economies. We’re bombarded by words—too many of which are hollow half-stories that fail to meet any human need for connection or meaning or feeling. Too many words that are ploys for our clicks, our likes, our impact on advertising dollars, or our own dollars straight out of our own pockets. Too many words that are, as Wendell Berry said, divorced entirely from the truth. The opposite of truth, like, hate rallies described as love fests.
Words become worse than lazy and cheap, they become meaningless and menacing in this context.
In a letter to class of schoolchildren years ago, Berry wrote this about writing and truth:
By taking up the study of writing now, you are assuming consciously, probably for the first time in your lives, a responsibility for our language. What is that responsibility? I think it is to make words mean what they say. It is to keep our language capable of telling the truth. We live in a time when we are surrounded by language that is glib, thoughtless, pointless, or deliberately false. If you learn to pay critical attention to what you hear on radio or television or read in the newspapers, you will see what I mean.
The first obligation of a writer is to tell the truth—or to come as near to telling it as is humanly possible. To do that, it is necessary to learn to write well.
So, yes, “anyone can write,” but … there’s more to it than that.
Against a raging torrent of lazy and manipulative language, a deluge of outright lies, our first challenge as creative writers is to grab hold of a reader and pull them out of that relentless riptide.
That is, our words must, like a life raft, offer readers something with enough strength, substance, and, yes, truth, to prevent them from getting sucked away by the mass distraction and destruction all around them.
This is no small feat. It requires attention, skill, and devotion. All of which take practice.
And even once we manage to get a reader’s attention—or, to continue the metaphor, once we’ve pulled them out of the raging river—we must follow through and give them something true and real and unique, something that matters. We must keep the promise we made when we threw the raft.
Today’s exercises offer ways to practice both of these elusive tasks with the help of literary constraints.
As many of you know, I am a firm believer in the power of constraints as an elastic and necessary driving force in artistic writing. Constraints have been used in creative writing throughout history and across cultures for as long as we have records of artistic writing. The reason for this is simple: intentional constraints make us better writers.
Constraints come in many shapes and sizes—word limits, structures, point-of-view, rhyming patterns, etc.—but on a whole, all constraints are essentially arbitrary high-level choices that determine the rules of how the story will be told.
Constraints are present in some form in any writing (even writing in English versus French versus Spanish, etc., is itself a constraint!), but the more we learn and practice using specific constraints on purpose, the better our writing gets. That’s because when used intentionally, constraints force us to downshift into “System 2” thinking.
And System 2 thinking is where creativity blossoms and truth emerges.
As Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow, explains:
• System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
• System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
When writing something constrained/rule-bound, like a sonnet or haiku, for example, we are shuttled into System 2 to search for a word with the right syllable count or ending sound, and while we’re busy with that search, System 1 is quieted (we can’t operate in both systems at the same time).
And the great thing about quieting System 1 is that it allows us to get beyond the “no effort” story and language that System 1 is so fond of coughing up for us (the story told with System 1’s “little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control,” as Kahneman describes).
Getting beyond System 1 (by engaging System 2) allows us, in turn, to discover the much more interesting, vivid, and compelling stories and language lurking outside the margins of System I’s easy inventory.
The writing produced using constraints may or may not be overtly “productive” or usable—but the discoveries we might experience while engaging System 2, no matter what actually lands on the page, can be invaluable. With a regular practice of experimenting with constraints, we are nearly guaranteed to elasticize our capacity to think outside of our known biases, stretch beyond the memorized stories about the world that limit our perception, and edge ever closer to writing that burns with the clean, hot fuel of truth.
Writing Exercises for Engaging System Two
So, this week we’ll play with intentional constraints, with the focus being far less on the writing we produce than on the process by which we produce it, and what we discover in that process. To note, I have written before, in depth, about the science of constraints—and how they cracked open my own writing permanently, leading to my book and awards—so I’ll not repeat all that here, but you can circle back to it if you missed it or want to revisit: From Play to Peril: The Surprising Power of Writing Constraints.
Meanwhile, if you try this week’s exercises, you will, by the time you finish one or more of them, have some interesting new insights about yourself as a writer and, hopefully, a slightly shifted perspective on whatever story you’ve been telling, a perspective more surprising, inventive, and, yes, true.
With constraints, it’s important to remember that the “tighter” the constraint, the more friction it will have against the content of your story, and the more friction it has, the more interesting things get, and the more interesting things get, the better the writing ultimately becomes. I say ultimately, because the writing you produce initially may or may not leap to life. Sometimes, it’s going to be really bad, just like any other time we come to the page. But the consistent practice of using constraints to expand your capacities of perception, ingenuity, and originality will unequivocally enliven your writing over time, no matter what happens in the moment.
Try to get the most out of the constrained writing exercises, try to follow the spirit of the instructions as best you can. That said, never let perfect be the enemy of good. You can always break the rules of any exercise that is set here!
Also note that any of these five exercises can be used for nonfiction as well as fiction (or poetry!), but most will be harder for nonfiction. Harder is not bad, it’s actually, for our purposes, good, because it’s just another level of constraint that pressurizes creativity!