"I mean, the world is so magnificent. I feel like we’re surrounded by gates and portals that are portals into—I don’t know—into more life." ~Marie Howe

Lit Salon on the paradoxical power of the literal for unleashing imagination in our lives, our bodies, and on the page ... and thoughts on how the literal can ultimately bring the metaphorical alive

“I had to sit with [this week’s exercise] for several days. The poem/meditation/yoga pose were lovely. I have done the pose/meditation every day since Wednesday, yet only yesterday did something emerge (there have also been lots of tears, this is truly powerful work).” ~Participant in The Visceral Self

I just came back from Portland, Oregon, where my husband and I were visiting our four-year-old granddaughter. In Portland, everything is blooming all at once. I told my friend I felt like I was walking around inside a Wes Anderson film, because the colors were so surreal.

But the colors weren’t surreal.

They were real.

Likewise, as I spent the weekend playing with our granddaughter, I was struck—as I always am when playing with children, for whom the veil between worlds is still open—by how vivid her imagination was, and how wholly real her imagined worlds were to her, especially when I shared those worlds with her, when I joined her there.

And were those castles and unicorns real, or imagined?

When we speak of embodied writing, we are, to some extent, speaking of this intersection between the real and the imagined.

We are speaking of—or at least, we are allowing ourselves to become very curious about—this liminal space between mind and body, where so many interesting and unpredictable things can emerge. That liminal space lives, in large part, in the sensory world. The world as we know it through our senses.

But since sensory experience is both lived, remembered, and anticipated, this liminal space includes the past, present, and future all colliding, because all of these time-states are, if we are to believe Einstein, happening at once. Opening myself to curiosity about all this has helped me to be more open and attentive to the present moment, yes, but also more open and attentive toward past and the future.

What this means for me, when it comes to my writing, is that making my writing better, more beautiful, and more effective requires an ever increasing awareness of the shifting dial between real and imagined.

By this I do not mean the difference between fiction and nonfiction.

What I mean, instead (at least in part) is the delineation between the inner and outer world. Or, as we say in the literary world, between interiority and exteriority on the page. I’ve written about before, in my Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things I Have Learned About Writing From Reading Thousands of Manuscripts post.

In that post, I wrote (among many other things) this:

Internal vs. External: Speaking of internal reflection—and by this, I mean the author’s thoughts, feelings, memories, ideas, explanations, predictions, and so forth—be careful of this reflective writing. Working out these ideas in our journals may have value for us as humans, yes, but sharing those same ideas in the same way in our creative writing can be ineffective at best and grating at worst. And almost always, doing so is less effective than using powerful external details to evoke a feeling from the reader. When strung together on purpose, precise exterior observations will often point to a deeper meaning that the reader can discover for herself without having it explained. Precise, exterior observations also create true metaphors, rather than constructed, overstretched ones. This, in the end, is what we really mean by the old adage, “show don’t tell.”

What I didn’t say, though, and maybe because I had not yet thought it all the way through, is that these “precise exterior observations” seem do the best work when they are very plain and literal. What I also did not say is that this plain and literal precise observation of the exterior world is one of the fundamental keys to embodied writing—that is, writing that comes through the body and evokes an embodied reaction in a reader.

And this—the role of the literal, and magic that can happen on the page depending on our ability to precisely convey the literal—became the topic of an extended conversation in the comments last week in The Visceral Self intensive for embodied writing when one of the writers admitted, “I still don’t understand what embodied writing is.”

The conversation that ensued is a rich example of what I love about creative communities in general and this Writing in the Dark community specifically—the thoughtful and dynamic exchange of ideas and imaginative synergy that leads to new breakthroughs and a greater depth of understanding, that become “new gates and portals into—I don’t know—into, more life.”

Here’s the conversation as it unfolded in real time in the comments with Mary G, a novelist who also writes the newsletter What Now?, through which she shares inventive writing prompts.

We ended up talking about, among other things:

• Close observation

• Plain language & worker words

• Marie Howe’s 10 Things assignment

• The idea of “the thing itself”

• The drudgery and possible deep boredom of observation

• What boredom might be masking from us

• The difference between bodies on the page and embodied writing

• Some concrete examples of writing that is more embodied and less embodied

• The power of the literal, and why looking at the world as it is can open doors to the unknown

Here’s the conversation, lightly edited.

Mary G: I'm gonna be honest that I'm still not sure what embodied writing is. I've read your words and I've looked online and I think perhaps it may be a concept that I have to define for myself, because all of the definitions I'm reading—I can't grasp them. So I'm seeing it as writing that includes the body, writing that isn't just about thoughts and feelings, but writing that includes the body's reaction to the environment and to those thoughts and feelings. Am I getting close, using that description? What I wrote this week and posted in the comments—the two young women in a bathroom stall, drenched in sweat—is meant to evoke the feeling of that time and what it felt like to be in those bodies at that time of my life. Am I at all close here to what you are telling me/us?

Jeannine: Hi, my brilliant friend. I don’t think embodied writing needs to include the body, though it can. And, by the way, this is just my take on it, the way I am practicing and understanding it. I am not some kind of authority, but I do speak from some experience in terms of reading about and practicing and teaching this, for what that is worth. I think you are on track when you say it's not "just about thoughts and feelings," and from there I would say it yes, might include the body's reaction to the environment, but it could also just include ... the environment, and let us feel the sensations for ourselves.

I am going to try to write about this next week in the craft essay part of the post. We're talking in part about Marie Howe's "the thing itself" style of teaching here. Here's a link to an excerpt of an interview Howe gave to Krista Tippett, talking about this. Sometimes, putting the body in, saying what the body sensed, is a form of filtering. Not always, but sometimes. We want to make the thing we’re writing about us. But sometimes, if we can just let the thing itself be observed precisely enough, the reader feels it even more deeply, all through their own body.

What I am describing here is one way—it is not the way or the only way. But, I do feel that it is an important thing to be able to do, like something foundational we can build up from. Thank you for asking this question. It's a really, really good one.

And yes, finally, you are doing what I am telling/talking about. I think most of us do this, some of the time at least, by instinct. What I am trying to do is bring our attention to it, make it on purpose, make it a thing we can drop into at will, because we know how to open the door, identify the embodiment in the prose, and press into it. Or not, when we don't want or need to (I mean, we do sometimes need to summarize/time jump/advance the narrative in other ways). This is one thing, but it's one thing that can do big things, if we want it to.

Mary G. Oh, this is so interesting. Summer Brennan teaches the 10 observations idea that Marie Howe talks about. I find it very hard to do! It really pushes me to be able to actually get to 10. I've learned that the practice includes remaining aware throughout the day that you must be observant of...everything. So that later, you can come up with 10 things. Simply writing "the thing itself" as it is, no metaphors to help. No abstractions.

Jeannine: Yes, that’s central to the way Howe teaches this. No metaphors, no abstractions, just the thing itself. The ten observations are literal, just the thing itself. It forces us to look at the world in a more attentive way, and to see it more clearly.

Mary G. I'm not sure the relation of that to embodied writing, but I will ponder it. I like when you say "let us feel the sensations ourselves." I think you mean that we have five senses and let's observe the world through all of them—and to do so is using our body's abilities. I don't know why this concept escapes me so. And I really appreciate you taking the time to try to work it out for me so that I can understand. I'm not there yet, but I think i will be soon enough. It frustrates me to not grok this!

Jeannine: In my experience, most most people do find it exceedingly difficult to focus on the thing itself. They want to make metaphors. They want to tell stories. They want to make leaps and twists with words. Marie Howe says it literally hurts us to look at and write only the thing itself, and I agree with her.

I think it hurts us initially because we're bored by it, but the boredom masks