Writer Toolbox – Process Peace

Missing Your Missives

March 11, 2025 Suzanne Biro1 Comment

I’m learning to work with my subconscious[1] for creative writing. My ability to do this…no, that’s not quite right, I mean my ability to control this—with attention and technique and love—is a recent accomplishment[2]. Gonna use this post to unpack and articulate my two-phase process (and celebrate my progress to a nascent phase two, because man oh man, it’s been a long time coming. Years!).

Phase One: Fish into the subconscious to dredge its messages to consciousness

The most interesting writing** I generate arises four ways. Sometimes these methods overlap with one another. Note a couple of these approaches apply some sort of restriction/constraint to the writing process[3]:

Swiftly written stream of consciousness writing in response to a prompt (i.e., write to the line blah blah… or, write an answer to blah blah question…or, write the scene between character A and B when…). Swiftly written means timed (short, < 15 minutes, though I have stretched drafting to < 30 minutes)
Using another piece of writing, a sentence’s or a poem’s, syntax or rhetorical device or structural form, as a template with which to slot in my own words, images and thoughts.
A line or an image that floats to me when I’m relaxed and engaged in another task (e.g., walking (exercising in general actually), showering, washing dishes, staring out the window, lying in bed[4]).
From dreams[5].

For me, applying a restriction when writing provokes my brain to think sideways. By this I mean punts me off my comfortable (well-trodden) neural pathways and avoid my default “thinking/meaning making” mode. The restriction stimulates “dreaming/imagining” mode (which is the natural state for #3 and #4 in the above list[6]).

**What do I mean by interesting writing? Here are some recent examples:

Type	Generative method	Example pulled from breezy drafts written in the last month
Image	< 12 minute response to a writing prompt	A woman dragging her carcass of a body on the back of a smile, marionette strings with which her dead weights were held up
Image	Dream	A massive black bear sitting on a stony shore, calm grey lake water, catching shiny silver fish. Then it’s holding an infant, and I hear rather than watch the bear’s jaws crunch through the baby’s neck and my thought is, ‘Ah well, I guess that’s done.’
Thought or Idea	Floater while exercising	People often use water words and imagery when they talk about the subconscious (e.g., stream, flow, ocean of awareness, diving deeper, swimming below the surface)
Comparison	< 15 minute response to a writing prompt	We’re taught to read…26 letters in the English alphabet and the millions of words they generate…but we’re never taught to read each other …and though we’re never taught, we do read these betweens (facial expressions, gestures, vocal tone, etc.), read them better than words sometimes.
Metaphor	Using a sentence by Peter Orner as a template	We started up, as you do lying to yourself: in the net of a valid excuse.[7]
Analogy (ish)	Stream of consciousness journaling when too tired before bed (not in the list above, but also, kind of a restriction …or imposed handicap)	I am a broken heart. It’s just sometimes I believe you can mend it. It’s the belief that destroys me.
Surprising word	Using a sentence by Jonathon Keats as a template	Tympanic (I know! I swear this word dropped from the universe onto the page…I wasn’t even sure it was a real word. I looked it up later. It is.)

Now, ideally, I should be able to write this way for longer periods with practice and without the necessary restrictions to provoke the interesting writing. But the truth is, I’m really challenged with this. Many writers can access the subconscious more easily …it’s a state that seems more natural for them.

A thought: the challenge accessing the subconscious might be the reason many artists and writers use alcohol or drugs—the inhibition substances enable—to create art. Substances lower the socio-cultural pressure gates, sanctioning a more permeable membrane between consciousness and subconsciousness. It’s a delicate balance to manage and risk of addiction is…high (no pun intended), so not an ideal pathway.

Substance use also alleviates deep emotional pain, a pain all humans endure to some degree…I’ll come back to this shortly.

So, there’s phase one. And I can confidently claim creating writing drafts that surface magical subconscious gifts. What I’ve been stumped by, until recently, is how to work with the gifted images to integrate them into a completed piece (story or poem).

Here’s my default strategy in a nutshell. The other week I was walking with a writer friend, discussing writing. Not for the first time, she said, “I have to tell you, I noticed it in your writing way back then, and you continue to do it: you overthink your writing,” we were wading a substantial snowbank and it interrupted her train of thought, “You need to….” here her voice trailed off to silence. Cliffhanger!!! Trying to keep my desperation in check, cough cough, swiping the snow from my legs, I asked, “More emotion? More feeling?” Yes, she said.

Truth is, I was flummoxed. Wasn’t I doing this already? Actually, no.[8]

Now, I’ve read enough craft essays at this point to understand there’s a chasm wide difference between applying a technical move to integrate emotion and the sublime skill of layering emotion in a piece to create a work of art. This is the same difference I can taste in dishes and desserts that are technically proficient but nevertheless lack a quality I swear to gawd I can sense on my tongue: dishes cooked without love. What does this taste like? Flat.

Here are fragments I’ve cherry picked and pasted together to serve my own understanding and purpose (is this allowed? probably not) from Jeanette Winterson’s brilliant essay, The Semiotics of Sex, from her collection, Art Objects, Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery:

“…it is worth remembering that the conventional mind is its own prison…Literature…packs in it supplies of energy and emotion that all of us need…Learning to read is a skill that marshals the entire resources of body and mind…I mean the ability to engage with a text as you would another human being…The love between you offers an alternative paradigm; a complete and fully realised vision in a chaotic unrealized world. Art is the realisation of complex emotion.”

I won’t go into it here, and I’m loathe to kind of even talk about it, but I must for the sake of Phase Two. Much of the work with my therapist involves me learning to feel emotion in my body. Those deep emotions mentioned earlier that many people resort to drugs or alcohol to suppress or annihilate? Turns out I use high level thinking and analysis as a (socially acceptable) way to bypass feeling anything too deeply. Joy is acceptable and, no doubt, I’m exuberant, especially after a martini. But pain? Oh, I’ll cognitize the fuck out of it. Once I understood this, I asked my therapist, failing to mute a whiney earnest wretchedness, am I disabled?

Here’s a drawing of my own creative writing ~~issue~~ process I figured out with my therapist[9]:

Phase Two: Switch from horizontal to vertical symbol translation and FEEL it goddamnit

This is less…concrete…than Phase One because I’m only just beginning to understand and practice writing this way. Here’s how I worked it out.

A few months ago, I posted a creative writing piece in progress, Measures, and used orange text inserts denoting my analysis and thinking about the images and surprising words that came through the breezy drafting bits (but, I note, not the ‘idea’ driven bits).

Originally, the piece was generated as a response to a writing prompt—but not timed—leaving me ample opportunity to twist a narrative around an idea. Which I did. That draft, despite the lack of constraints, held a few scarce subconscious breadcrumbs that I didn’t recognise at the time. I have many many drafts like this (soft whimper).

When I was preparing to read Measures at a public reading, I collaged the original draft together with other fragments of writing I’d done using constraints. I was rushing the edits (a self-imposed constraint). As I collaged, I could sense parts of the text vibrating some energy. I know, weird, but that’s the best way I can explain it. Those vibrating bits, I recognise now, signal subconscious missives. Maybe other people feel this differently, perhaps it’s simply noticing or a feeling of curiosity. However they’re identified, they’re the bits I have to attend to with care and devotion…a kind of nurturing love.

Phase 2 A

So, what does this look like in practice? It’s leaning into the feelings and emotions arising from the vibrating images and surprising words or metaphors. Instead of staying with surface logic, descend into the body, slow down, notice, INVITE the complex emotions swimming around my insides[10]. Name them – here’s a handy emotion wheel as reference. Map them (i.e., in the body – gut? heart? lungs? heat? cold? tension?).

For me this requires undisturbed focus best achieved comfortably propped up with pillows in bed. Because this is deeply discomforting work. Feeling sorrow, fear, shame, pain, anything deeply conflictual…it’s only with intentional effort that I sink into these feelings and pinpoint which ones adhere to the piece of creative writing I’m working with. The initial emotion identification process is much less writing and far more, well, active attention to feeling[11].

Once complex emotions are recognised, named and mapped, the task becomes layering the cascade of emotion into the piece. Because it isn’t just one emotion, it’s the movement from one (or several) emotion to the next. Emotion doesn’t just arise out of nowhere, it’s a relational reaction; it’s the energy of the between (often between people, but can also be between perception, say, a scent, and memory, or between animals and humans, or between landscape and humans…the list goes on…the important bit is that the emotion arises out of relationship). This is the experience, the relationship energy, I want my reader to feel. I’m creating an experience of complex emotion and I’m communicating, to borrow Winterson’s line, with text as I would another human being. It’s an intimacy.

Phase 2 B

How to do that? Here’s where it gets interesting. As a kid, I used to love those puzzles of what appeared to be hundreds of coloured dots on a page but when concentrated on a certain way and intentionally altering the angle of focus, the two-dimensional field of dots coalesced and popped what appeared as a three-dimensional image. Suddenly a 3D stag was running at me from the page[12]. The optical illusion puzzles are called Autostereograms (yes, I had to look this up).

The 3D puzzle is analogous to the process I used to layer complex emotional change into my working draft. Here’s an attempt to clarify my process (I’m still working on this….in a few months I might completely change my thinking, but for now, this works):

the effect of the movement of feelings in the piece is like seeing/feeling the 3D image
the subconscious missives in the form of images, metaphors, surprising words etc. are the dots
The intellectual meaning or the question the draft might be revolving around is like the 2D field of dots
the success of the story is proportional to the elegance with which a writer can layer all these aspects together, the coalescing of components – that movement from 2D to 3D….which, I suspect, is sensed and felt by the reader as opposed to through the mechanism of critical analysis.
How is this done? By blending technical aspects (don’t let them take over!) with subconscious/dream aspects (the signposts of emotional energy)
achieving the elegance of coalescing is the practice

So, this was how I approached the rewrite of Measures, a 905-word creative nonfiction piece. It’s my first intentional emotion blending attempt. When I was puzzling to layer the emotional movements in the piece, a specific line surfaced from the depths as I wrote and fiddled with the syntax (a subconscious gift!) and I burst into tears. A couple of friendly readers, though not all, experienced the same at the same paragraph in the piece. I’ve submitted the story to a few places for publication, waiting for submission windows to open at others…but really, reader reaction means, for me, the writing sings.

[1] I noticed I use the word subconscious as opposed to unconscious. I use subconscious to refer to information just below conscious awareness. But unconscious kind of means that too, though I think of unconscious information as deeper, more inaccessible. Like, my body doesn’t need to think about breathing or my heart beating to keep it upright (most of the time…falling in love or stubbing my bare toe on a concrete parking block changes all that, at least for a short moment). I admit, I took another deep dive into the differences and theories of mind conceptualizing unconscious and subconscious. Short synopsis: originally, the two words were used interchangeably as part of psychological theory. At some point, “unconscious” became synonymous with scientific rigour, while “subconscious” was significantly downgraded (ha ha, no pun intended) to parlance related to woo woo pseudoscientific pursuits, like, you know, tarot cards and ouija boards. So, there’s a classist-type interpretation of the two words. But, in other contexts, subconscious and unconscious refer to different levels of information below our conscious awareness, the former being slightly more accessible than the latter. Accessibility is thought to be achieved through intentional reflection practices, talk therapies, etc. [Here’s two whole paragraphs on this subject deleted. You’re welcome.]

[2] Okay, control is probably too strong a word here because the process of working this way, working with a subconscious (and yes, with the switch to using the indefinite article I’m proposing the subconscious is not mine alone, but rather a collective and fluid energy we all swim in…who’s woo woo now? ha ha ha) retains a high degree of mystery and hangs in dreamlike suspension (hang and suspension redundant? no, here dreamlike suspension is a thing, a state of being, maybe even a place).

[3] Though a word count cap is, technically, a restriction, I’ve found this insufficient for accessing the subconscious. Fewer words in a piece forces grammatical and syntactical discipline. Also, an efficiency of imparting information. But I can still think my way to a finished piece without layering in emotional heat (this is explored in Phase Two). This might also be why fragments written in emails and texts can sometimes fish out unexpected images, words….certainly humour bits I wouldn’t have thought of intentionally except for the challenge to provide a witty reply.

[4] Best, for me anyway, if not listening to a podcast or distracted by any visual media. Music seems to be okay, though floaty lines are heavily influenced by lyrics so this is a risk…it’s best if I’m not distracted at all. For the last year and a half or so, I’ve eschewed most media, including film, shows, news, in order to nurture and invite….access?…subconscious messaging. Also, ‘cause I just need the quiet.

[5] I keep a dream journal. I have since 2018 and kicking myself for not starting earlier. BUT – this is hard for me…I rarely remember my dreams …must apply intentional effort to remember them. When I wake, they’re dissolving very very fast. And if I wake in the night, too often I think, oh, I’ll write that down in the morning. Of course, by then, it’s long gone. Despite the dream journal an arm’s length from my pillow, I fail to reach my hand out in the dark. I remember my dreams better when I’m on vacation (I take this to mean that it’s only when I’m relaxed and rested that I’m really able to dialogue with dreams…work-life is too energy taxing. It’s a frustration for sure).

[6] Dreaming may not be “a restriction” per se – but could argue “not being awake” is.

[7] I love this line – it’s got two people in it, a narrator who is lying to themselves and colluding with the reader on this (reader senses the inclusion and also wants to know why), plus the metaphor “net” surfaces connotations of “caught in a trap” of a valid excuse. The reader senses the push-me pull-you tension of an excuse that is likely not valid or at the very least is a trap….but see? Here I have veered off into super analytical mode, ultra meaning making….I run the risk of using my usual approach and creating a “thought up” story as opposed to a “dreamed up” one. I feel the sentence would be a great first line of a story….ripe for using the timed write method to see what else will surface in a more dream-like way…get more text from the subconscious to the page before meddling with it.

[8] This blog is, I know, ultra thought concept driven. I don’t count the posts I write here as my “creative writing” work. Here, I’m exercising (exorcising?) my analytical tendencies …with the faint hope this will make space in my brain (and body) to allow the dreamwork to happen.

[9] Another friend, when I showed her this drawing explaining my thinking behind it, said, “wait, you drew a model of your analysis of your overthinking?” I erupted gales. A sense of humour is also an acceptable coping strategy for managing deep emotional pain. Subject for another post, this one is too long. Hopefully you’re still with me.

[10] You have no idea how difficult this is. I’m working on it.

[11] Am I also researching epigenetic biological embedding of experiences, relational neurobiology and the ontogenesis of shame, internalised oppression and morality? You betcha. [my gawd, she really is f-ing nutty nut bar]. Don’t worry, I do all of this half-assed.

[12] An AI generated overview of how to “see” the stag – Parallel (or wall-eyed) method: Focus your eyes as if looking at a point behind the image, not directly at the image itself; Cross-eyed method: Try to cross your eyes slightly to focus on a point beyond the image. Not gonna touch the AI grenade here…except to opine that feelings and emotions are often beyond words and language (why we need dreams and art as translation mechanisms) and I don’t believe AI will learn to fish the subconscious the way humans can hone their ability to.

An Invitation

March 17, 2024March 30, 2024 Suzanne Biro

Collage I created March 16, 2024 in an art workshop facilitated by hiba ali at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.

My favourite professor in undergrad taught neurophysiology, biological psychology and behavioural neuroscience of motivation. I have a distinct memory of his explaining how the size of the human brain is governed by the restricted size of the birth canal (technically, it’s referred to as the obstetrical dilemma) . Surprise, turns out it’s a little more complicated than that. Much neurodevelopment continues during the postnatal period and neuroplasticity is lifelong. But beyond this, our brains sufficiently evolved to invent machines with super-fast processing speeds and computational abilities. At this point, most of us have adopted palm-sized prosthetic brains in the form of cell phones, and with them, we have access to more information we could filter, sort or ever hope to synthesize, especially across diverse subjects.

This is what I was thinking about last week when I attended a webinar providing an overview of Google’s Notebook LM, a new AI application launched in December 2023, that basically functions as a virtual research assistant. Let’s call it an(other) extra brain [1].

Yes, I’ll be one of the early adopters, especially for my day job. But I’m also interested in how the technology could become a tool to support creative process. Though, to be sure, a tool used with caution.

A swift summary: LM stands for language model and the application uses the conversational question functionalities of ChatGPT, BUT allows you to curate a discrete library of your own source documents for the AI to search through. So, any question you ask will draw an answer from ONLY the documents you have provided, personalizing sources to a particular project, erecting a knowledge barrier you can control and thus greatly reducing inaccuracies and hallucinations [2].

The application currently integrates Docs, PDFs, txt, and pasted text using the cut and paste function. There’s promise websites will be able to be imported soon. Likely, the import of images, PowerPoint and even Excel sheets will be functional in the not-so-distant future.

An older collage I created December 2022.

I often use the search and find function in documents to locate phrases and key words. This is especially important when reviewing legislation and evidence reports under tight timelines, but I also use the function in creative writing to locate word repetitions, check misplaced homonyms, homophones, homographs, get rid of weasel words [3] etc. But this function has only been possible in one document at a time. I’ve used qualitative analysis software to support analyses and syntheses across interview and focus group transcripts, as well as multiple word documents. Using qualitative software, a considerable amount of time (time in which your brain actually feels like it’s turning to mush) is used to manually “tag” words and phrases in every source transcript or document to a category in order to code the text data. This can take weeks or even months, depending on how much text makes up the project and the theoretical approach you have chosen to apply. Once all of the text data is coded, THEN you can go in and query the dataset for analysis using your coding structure. The capabilities promised by Notebook LM will (almost) eliminate the coding step, allowing a researcher to jump right into querying the data for patterns and moving forward from a super advanced starting line.

Imagine this application for:

summarizing systematic research reviews (practically this is very similar to conducting qualitative analysis)
understanding legislation changes over time or creating a bylaws database that could be posted to municipal websites to support citizen Q & A
referencing medical symptoms and best practice guidelines – could this replace a visit to a family physician, linking a person directly to a pharmacist or triaging a health issue to an allied health care worker for virtual assessment and confirmation, at least for common non-emergency ailments?
Discovering patterns across historical documents or novels or essays or groups of poems or across all these different types of documents
Bringing disparate subjects together to spark different ideas, say climate resilience strategies, poetry, child development, hip hop song lyrics and how long to cook an egg [4].

My daughter Willa made this collage last week procrastinating school assignments. She is much better at collage than I am and has created some truly stunning combination of images. I love the mum and child flower heads in this one. This collage inspired me to sign up for the workshop, a welcome oasis of calm following the move into my new (to me) physical space. Another one of Willa’s at the end of this post. Thanks Willa!

The collage at the top of this post is a good analogy for the possible repercussions Notebook LM threatens related to creative licensing and copyright. I pasted the collage together from bits of cut out magazines and art books as part of a fantastic afternoon workshop facilitated by hiba ali, The Studio x Open Secret: Activating Dreamscapes. The images I used came from artists’ works and photographs from books and National Geographic magazines and I’ve cut and reassembled them without any credit to create my own artwork. Where should the line of creative appropriation, cultural appropriation, or plagiarism be drawn in these new digital spaces and the “new” creative works produced using these tools? [5]

Attending this collage workshop in the same week as the webinar kind of blew my mind – an ocean of virtual playgrounds to swim in. It’s also a little frightening, the control to create frames of knowledge that might hold sway an illusion of authority for many. I’m (somewhat) comforted to learn (also this week! my goodness) the word set boasts a Guinness World Record with the most senses of meaning (430!) of any other word. Other sources award this honour to run with more than 600 senses. Perhaps the english language will retain sufficient nuance an AI might never master (wishful thinking). BUT, language combined with gesture, intonation, facial expression, raw instinct etc. may give AI a run for its money (I hope).

Once we created our collages in the art workshop, we uploaded them to a digital art exhibition “world” space where we co-created together and were able to manipulate the images, integrate a variety of additional media (sound, text, links, gifs etc.). This application is New Art City. It reminds me of the game Minecraft my kids used to play when they were younger. Here’s a link to what I created playing [6] in the New Art City application with my own collage and the virtual gallery space: https://newart.city/show/souxs-virtual-creative-space-space-1.

All this virtual creativity at your fingertips for a song. To be sure, what we create as our real world is built from layers of many worlds—perceptual, spiritual, cultural, relational, linguistic, so many others—and, of course, virtual [7]. Jouer le jeu as they say in French, play the game. But the digital space is really an out of body experience; sometimes we might just have to communicate the old-fashioned way, you know, via email or phone or (gasp!) face to face. Especially when virtual platforms are an invitation to experiment interacting multidimensionally. Like I said, you’re welcome.

[1] Sorry Canadian peeps, the experimental version is only available to those living in the US. Canucks are still waiting to test drive the application.

[2] The information returned is less likely to be made up by the machine… hallucinations are complicated, I’m not going to try to explain them.

[3] From Matt Bell’s Substack, No failure, Only Practice, Exercise #14: Hunting Weasel Words.

[4] I know, weird, but you get what I’m suggesting.

[5] I don’t know the answer to this at all but it’s an interesting question and I would value a discussion.

[6] Other applications that I didn’t use but leave here as reference: Photopea, a free online photo editor; Free3D, free three dimensional models; Creative Commons, “an international nonprofit organization dedicated to helping build and sustain a thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture. Together with an extensive member network and multiple partners, we build capacity, we develop practical solutions, and we advocate for better open sharing of knowledge and culture that serves the public interest.”

[7] As long as the power stays on.

Serendipitously, when I texted Willa to get her permission to insert her flower head collage in this post, she was working on this larger collage as part of a school assignment (not procrastinating this time ha ha, it’s for a final project about the mutual oppression of women and nature, although she had intended a textile applique but ran out of time). The photos in this work are from a woman’s beauty guide book from the 1980s, The Complete Beauty Book, an interesting, admittedly sexy visual commentary to be sure.

Sounds Off

August 27, 2023 Suzanne Biro2 Comments

I very nearly botched the possibility of any relationship with my now husband the first time he asked me out, replying to his tentative request to take me to dinner with an audible exasperation—I’m embarrassed to say it, but an almost-admonishment— “What took you so long?!”

Much later he told me how, in the dead seconds of silence that followed my blurt, he very nearly turned heel and walked away (a fuck that, if there ever was one). My reaction stopped him cold. I can only think he must have caught the note of elation in my voice, noticed the sparkle of mischief in my eyes, the play blossoming my grin.

Some context for my blunder: Months earlier he’d attempted to ask me out but our conversation was interrupted, and, despite an alluring notoriety with women, he was timid with me. His notoriety prevented me from asking him out. Not only that, but his notoriety also made me mistrust him…he was too attractive, too confident. I resorted to using a tactic I’ve come to refer to as ‘the mixed barb’, an unexpected, lightly teasing, droll divulgence, testing him against himself. Communicating this way—a skill sharpened in a childhood home where moods shifted precipitously from rainbows to menace—has served me well, personally and professionally. Quick jabs shaded with humour fast reveal the contours of people’s personalities, offer a glimpse of their shadow selves, delineate boundaries, expose what they’re willing to put up with – and what I really mean when I say that is, testing whether they’ll put up with me.

Though this works well face-to-face where intonation and gesture, pitch, and facial expressions shoulder the palanquin carrying my royal intentions, I’ve discovered the strategy collapses in my writing. For example, my royal intentions from that last sentence was meant to be read with layered notes of self-deprecation, irony and superciliousness. Did I fail there? Likely.

George Orwell suggested, “A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.”[1] For speaking and writing more information is needed to furnish a joke, but also, words in general. “An alteration in tone or pitch can be the difference between …fighting words and a statement of love, using the identical phrase, such as “You’re really something,” a completely meaningless statement without a tone or context to support it.”[2]

Peter Elbow explains vocal variety thoroughly when asking us to “Consider how many musical resources of intonation or prosody we can use when we talk. There is pitch (low to high); volume (soft to loud); speed (slow to fast); accent (yes or no); intensity (relaxed to tense); timbre (breathy, shrill, nasal, and many more); pausing (long and short). Note that these are not binary items, for in each case there is a full continuum between extremes (e.g., between low and height, slow and fast). There are glides and jumps. Also, there are patterned sequences. For example, tune is a pattern of pitches; rhythm is a pattern of slow and fast and accent. We change meanings by using subtle or not so subtle pauses or small intensifications or lengthenings of a syllable. Combinations of all of these make a rich palate we all use to paint meaning.”[3]

Robert Pinsky simplifies this beautifully: “It is almost as if we sing to each other all day.”[4]

But how to get the audible features of speech to the written page? I suspect the answer to this question requires a lifetime of exploration. Perhaps it’s even THE ANSWER to writing well (musically, entertainingly, clearly, compassionately, provocatively, etc.). Robert Frost thought so, “The tone-of-voice element is the unbroken flow on which the others are carried along like sticks and leaves and flowers.”[5] So, today’s post is simply this quest’s beginning.

More Frost: “What we do get in life and miss so often in literature is the sentence sounds that underlie the words. Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and to [prove] this… take the example of two people who are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation. This is because every meaning has a particular sound-posture; or, to put it in another way, the sense of every meaning has a particular sound which each individual is instinctively familiar with and without at all being conscious of the exact words that are being used is able to understand the thought, idea, or emotion that is being conveyed.”[5]

One way to get audible intonations to the page is to write in directions for how the reader ought interpret the words.

In Longshore Drift, a short story published in Granta, Julia Armfield employs this directing technique two ways: in text direction and by cueing the reader using italics. Here are three examples excerpted from the story (colour coding mine):

“There are warning flags along the wrack line: sharks – swim at your own risk. The threat is actually minimal, basking sharks being liable to give you little more than a bump on the knee, but the effect of the signs is still an odd one. There are no barriers, the water is open, creating the sense of a curiously lackadaisical approach to public safety. Danger, but do what you want, we’re not the police.”
‘Fair enough,’ she nods, and while her tone is light Alice feels she can detect the faintest note of mockery. ‘Mustn’t be bitter with my litter.’ ‘Fair enough’, this stock phrase, its cringing detachment. The sudden removal of camaraderie and Alice clawing after it.”
“The boys cluster like geese. One of them, wet-lipped with a tongue piercing, asks Min what she’s doing selling ice cream on such a chilly day. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a truck like this.“

A whole story might revolve around the differences between what is said and what is meant. Here’s the first paragraph of a micro story written by SJ Sindum, Mother, published in The Cincinnati Review (again, colour coding mine):

“My mother tells me to be careful. I’m twelve years old, and we’ve just moved to a city outside of Boston. We live in an apartment complex that my white fiancé, twenty years later when we visit, will call “shit housing.” I walk to school every day, a two-mile stroll along a busy road, and my mother tells me to be careful. What she means is, keep your head down, keep walking, don’t talk to anyone, I’m sorry.”

Each paragraph of Sindum’s story ends with similarly directed subtext, stretching implied intonation with deeper emotional resonance. A good example of Charles Baxter’s comparison of subtext to “the ghosts moaning from beneath the floor.”

“Reading is telepathy (literally “feeling from afar”). A writer’s magical transference of thoughts, ideas, and emotions—the context, text, and subtext— to the reader across space and time.”^[6]

And I want to slide that observation (riffed from a more beautifully written version by Terrance Hayes (see the footnote)), alongside another stunner: “Meanings are not in words, they are in people.”^[7]

So, another (ongoing) lesson for me: lavish sprinkling of humour in my writing, without judicious written expansion to convey my specific thoughts, ideas or emotions, fails to cue and direct the reader to my intended meaning, whether a playful poke in the ribs, the softening of a chiding remark, or taking the piss out (as my mum used to say, meaning, to bring someone down from their [self-perceived] lofty position). Unless the reader is intimately familiar with my quirky (snarky, often cynical, occasionally lewd) sense of humour voiced in person, my written inflection is flipped on its back. Wrestler style.

[1] George Orwell: ‘Funny, but not Vulgar’ First published: Leader. — GB, London. — July 28, 1945.

[2] Baxter, Charles. The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. Graywolf Press, 2007.

[3] Elbow, Peter, “5. Intonation: A Virtue for Writing Found at the Root of Everyday Speech” (2010). Emeritus Faculty Author Gallery. 34. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/emeritus_sw/34

[4] Pinsky, Robert. The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

[5] Robert Frost on ‘The Sound of Sense’ and on ‘Sentence Sounds’ https://udallasclassics.org/wp-content/uploads/maurer_files/Frost.pdf

[6] I love these beautiful lines by Terrance Hayes from the preface of his book, Watch Your Language, “Reading is a mix of telepathy and time travel. It’s a magical transference of information, knowledge, and mystery: the context, text, and subtext of a reader’s life.” But I’ve stolen those sentences, fiddled the words and ideas and repurposed them to my own ends here. Not as elegant as Haye’s sentences, to be sure, but landing a slightly different meaning.

Hayes, Terrance. Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry. Penguin Books, an Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2023.

[7] Elbow, Peter, ‘Intonation: A Virtue for Writing at the Root of Everyday Speech’, Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing. New York, 2012.

A Fish Out of Water: Syntax

June 30, 2023June 30, 2023 Suzanne Biro

When I went to elementary school in the 70s and 80s, it was vogue, fashioned after curriculum direction in the UK, lessons on grammar and syntax be removed from the curriculum with the belief (not proven with time) the lessons would simply assimilate through reading, exercises in comprehension (meaning making), and natural conversation.

And a science focused career further limited my exposure to language construction (blunted it more like. Punted any raw, sensual subjectivity, the glorious immersion of being human in a living world, to a cold field of disconnection and distanced objectivity, but I digress). The result: I must always look up the definitions for parts of sentences (adverb (?! yes, it’s true), gerund, participle), the application of verb tenses and rhetorical terms (these never stay in my head, it’s a completely foreign language). I’m only recently (last couple years) conscious of the conceptual gymnastics syntax enables one to perform.

But my lack of education is not what I want to write about here today. Instead, in the way of shimmery near-rhymes, I want to describe my process learning to use syntax as a way to mine my intuition. This practice (nascent) is cultivating my writing, slowly, slowly, so slowly, making it, if not more beautiful, certainly more textured, possibly (hopefully?) more complex.

Importantly, the practice disciplines thinking. Alters perspectives. Allows the mind to become supple. Open.

There’s a June Jordan quote tacked on the corkboard in front of my writing desk that captures this sentiment so much better, “The syntax of a sentence equals the structure of your consciousness.”

By intuition in this context, I mean what the subconscious mind is telling you, learning to trust it knows so much more before your conscious mind does. Responding to writing prompts, I put my pen to paper and let the words fly. In this way, something surprising, often beautiful—an image, a metaphor, a sensory cue—always rises to the surface (usually only at the very end of the exercise). Often, I’m left with a slightly baffling fragment and no clue as to how I might proceed or stick it together with another section of text (and attempts to force it really botch the whole thing up). This is when applying syntactical techniques may be used to open a window for creativity (and intuition) to breeze in.

Here’s what I mean (so floaty in the abstract mind space, my apologies, let’s get grounded). Syntax is simply the arrangement of words and phrases to create [a] well-formed sentence¹. I’ve been practicing how to write sentences, gratefully working through exercises posted so generously by Nina Schuyler on her Substack Stunning Sentences.

Nina’s exercises break sentences into their component parts, grammatical and syntactical, and she sequences and names the parts so they may be followed as a template to slot in your own words and thoughts. I work through Nina’s exercises each week (well, I try to keep up). I’m too shy to post them there (and I don’t always succeed in my attempts, often capturing only 3/4 of the layered pieces that make the whole), but the practice is so helpful to me.

Start with a base clause: grind the meaning of the sentence down to its essentialness, who is this about (subject), where is it taking place (setting) or what is happening (action). And then, by erecting layers of structure (syntax, grammar, rhetorical techniques), complexity of meaning, depth, a resonance imbued with life and rhythm is, architecturally, revealed.

The layers of structure move a reader through the writer’s thinking and meanings using, as Francis Christensen’s 1963 essay, A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence explains, levels of abstraction or generality, movement (directing the reader’s eye to earlier or later parts in the sentence). Christensen’s theories enriched John Erskine’s. Here’s a quote of Erskine’s that I love, from a 1946 essay, The Craft of Writing, quoted in Building Great Sentences by Brooks Landon:

“What you wish to say is found not in the noun but in what you add to qualify the noun. The noun is only a grappling iron to hitch your mind to the reader’s…The noun, the verb, and the main clause serve merely as a base on which meaning will rise. The modifier is the essential part of any sentence.”

Circling back to intuition and tying it in with Nina’s exercises, working through the sentence templates (grammatical, syntactical, rhetorical) I am forced to feel my way through the possibilities of how the original thought (could be the stripped down base clause) might expand. From my own free writing, I can select an image, a metaphor, a sensory cue, an action, extract it from my draft and let my intuition, carried through the templates, show me what my mind senses before I really even know.

In a recent post to The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave responded to a question about creativity, being stuck, and art making, which again, explains this better than I can:

“As a songwriter, I have come to understand that the more I try to make art that somehow reflects what I perceive myself to be, or the identity I wish to project upon the world, the more my art resists. Art doesn’t like being told what to do. It doesn’t like me getting in the way. When I attempt to impose my will upon it, the work becomes diminished and art takes its better ideas elsewhere…[Art] insists that we retract our ego, our sense of self, the cosmetics of identity and let it do its thing. We are in service to art, not the other way round.”

Practicing this way is very slow. I sit and think a lot more (imagining) before attempting to fill each sentence component on the page. I switch to pencil for these exercises – there’s a lot of rubbing out, a lot of cross outs too. It feels a lot more like how I feel when I write poetry…the process of intentional writing I apply to poetry. It taxes the brain, but in a good way, a way that alerts you, wakes you to deeper meanings on offer.

But there is a richness of material being laid down. Suddenly every word (or component) opens so much more potential for something larger, more meaningful, more complex. It shows me what I’m thinking, before I even know myself. And this feels exciting. And pleasurable.

How classes on reading comprehension were ever severed from syntax instruction I will never fathom. Subject for a different rant.

Slowly, slowly, slowly I am learning. No longer gasping for breath, a fish out of water, just a process of learning to swim. And the education, though painful at times, is a joy.

Small beauties culled from a pre-pandemic notebook – I was drawing instead of writing when attending a writing retreat.

¹ Discovered syntax etymology is from the late 16th century, via French or late Latin from Greek suntaxis, from sun- ‘together’ + tassein ‘arrange’. What a delightful riff on the warmth of a sun.

Casting Call for My Narrator Plus a Kick in the Bum to My Statistician

April 28, 2023 Suzanne Biro1 Comment

It’s been a slow dawning, learning that my narrator—even when I’m writing my own memories, writing about my self, my thoughts, my feelings—needs to be someone playing a role, a dramatic one. Who my narrator will be (because, yes, this is very future, I haven’t figured it out yet) is distinct from point of view (how the memories are relayed to a reader using perspective, what the narrator’s relation to the story is) and distinct from the tenses of verbs (when, in time, the person of the verb is “doing” “verbing?”). Confusingly, the narrator may be what is referred to as “voice”. Perhaps the terms are interchangeable, I don’t know. Maybe something to unpack in a later post. But thinking of the narrator as the person who tells the story, helps frame many writing decisions within a larger composition, from the sentence level to the whole.

An attempt to explain what I mean and where I want to go with this:

I’m five months into challenging myself to a “just get it down on paper!” exercise. For the first time, I tracked my progress, in number of words, and the time devoted to the task, in minutes. I had wanted to get to 70, 000 words (book length). Surprise! I haven’t hit that target. These last few weeks, I’ve laboured emotionally to make peace with this and move on. See the graphical display of progress here:

Some observations from tracking:

Most important: quantity in number of words does not equal quality. Not even close. More on this shortly (and yes, a link back to who the narrator is for this work…I’ll get there).
The shape of the line for the time put in, for this specific progress snapshot, follows the same shape of progress for the number of words. This could lead one to conclude (repeating the religious mantra): time put in = productivity out (measured in number of words). This is a misleading conclusion for creative writing because again, it ignores the quality of the writing (and all the measures of quality we can come up with, things like comprehension, emotional resonance with a reader, use of imagery, compositional techniques, sentence variability, word choice, structural approach, etc. The list is endless. Endless!).
There were stretches of time (weeks) showing zero output for both measures. Practically (qualitatively) this was because there were weeks I was away on vacation and didn’t work on the project and one week managing my grief after making the very difficult decision to have one of our pets put down. Gutted. But other weeks I did work on writing, just not this specific project. Instead, I wrote a short story and two flash pieces, plus a few posts to this blog. The chart doesn’t capture this. I recorded this separtely with notes and making myself reflect about the progress I made each week (with an intention to start fresh the following week).
Can’t ignore the downward trend depicted in the chart. I started off “well” in December – lots of time and words to begin with, then the lines gradually slide, tilting towards the x-axis to confirm my progress has slowed and stalled.
Another bit of context not captured in the chart: I started tracking for this project after writing just over 20, 000 words already. So, my actual word output for this project is just over 50, 000 words. Not bad. In quantity. At least the pages confirm I can create a book-length work (well, novella maybe).
If I focused on only these outcome measures, measures that confirm it takes me 5 months of creative writing time to reach an equivalent work week I put into my day job, I’d plunge into a depression too deep to climb out from. Instead, I learn what I can from this exercise and pivot.

What I’ve alluded to already with the differences between quantitative and qualitative measures, is that quality matters far more than quantity. I’ve also discovered the draft I’ve completed, chasing after the number of words down on paper, was written for myself. All 50, 000 plus words! I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help calling it my Vomit Draft. I’ve got the memories and (some) feelings and the cultural references I wanted to fold into the piece named and listed, but I haven’t packaged my writing in any shape or form a reader would be engaged with. “I” am not my audience. I need to carve a narrator to reshape how the stories are told, a narrator who will engage an audience, a narrator who performs that work. In making this choice, I will change the quality of my writing. My hope is to transform the raw emotions and memories into something funny, something entertaining. So, the work shifts now, with intention, towards understanding which part of my self I can call on to become that narrator. I want a narrator with the following qualities:

Someone who is funny
Someone who is humble
Someone with compassion
Someone who works to understand other people’s perspectives
Someone who isn’t whiney
Someone without a chip on their shoulder (ha, ha, better get my surgical tools)
Someone who forgives
Someone kind of cool (?) (I can see my kids cringing)
Someone with charisma
Someone with audacity (this is the hardest)

Note: all qualities impossible to measure with numbers.

I’m back to the beginning with this project…and will take the time needed to create this role, this persona. I foresee a lot more time sitting at the writing desk, puzzling to reveal this narrator in the rendering of every sentence. Kick in the bum to tracking words, I’m done with that.

Part Two of non-writing (ish) tools for a writer’s toolbox: Mind Maps

February 27, 2023 Suzanne Biro

Part One here.

It is always useful to try to trick my thinking out of usual habits and patterns of thought. My brain is lazy and too often follows the path of least resistance to finish a task. When writing, this laziness leads to cliches and shallow (one dimensional) observations that do nothing to pique the interest of a reader (or me, the writer, for that matter). Also, I prevent wider interpretations, deeper meanings, messages from the subconscious, before they have a chance to arise. Mind maps are a quick and (relatively) easy way to provoke (and see) expansions of meaning and the connections between them.

It is best, when creating a mind map, to relax and clear your mind…think meditation or yoga practice here. Sometimes it is good to set a timer for these exercises – 10 minutes tops – otherwise it could keep unfolding. That’s okay too…just follow your intuition on this one.

On a blank piece of paper, in the middle of the page, write a word or phrase you are wrestling with (or select one at random from the middle of a book, a dictionary, a cereal box, it really doesn’t matter…sometimes the most banal source will yield the richest ideas). Circle the word or phrase. Relax (yes, I keep having to tell myself this). Look at that word/phrase and allow your mind to drift and dream. Write down the images and associations as they come, anywhere on the page…as the associations are written down, they spark additional thoughts and images. Write these down too. Enjoy it. When the images start to wind down or the timer goes off, stop. It’s good to get up and walk away from the desk for a minute or two: make a cup of tea or gaze out the window. I’m usually too impatient though and dive into the next step, which is to look at what has been rendered on the page and start to draw lines of connections between them (often I do these steps simultaneously too). Very soon, the lines become tangled and cross each other. This is okay. At this point I realise there’s a lot more to think about than I had originally thought but I can now see avenues of exploration I might move through.

Mind maps are good to use as a writing prompt when facing an intimidating blank page. But they are also great tools for deepening existing writing: maybe an interesting image, or a provocative object, or a weird description or phrase has surfaced in a draft…but it doesn’t feel right—it nags—it doesn’t quite hang together with the sentiments (paragraph) around it. Trust the nagging/curiosity feeling. Copy the image/object/phrase onto a blank piece of paper to use as the starting node in a mind map.

Mind maps might also be used as art making device, subbing in a sort of shorthand thinking for how a work of art might be built. Theo Anthony, an American film maker, uses mind maps to work through generating ideas and connections, but then takes this one step further by planning his shots (camera type, lighting, angle, sequencing etc.) according to the nodes on his developing, evolving, project-based mind maps. In a way, this allows a lot of technical planning (to be on location, to select film equipment, etc.) without the creative constraint of a complete storyboard. His process, using mind maps this way, retains a flexibility, and enables resonances and surprises to illuminate organically. In a way, it’s as if he provides the operational support for the art, image, and beauty to reveal itself through the making.

Part One: non-writing (ish) tools for a writer’s toolbox

January 27, 2023 Suzanne Biro1 Comment

I read a lot of scientific papers for my day job. I also keep up (read: try to keep up, it’s impossible) with a mish mash of related current events (politics, economics, social issues, social media, etc.). It’s a lot of information to synthesize; bits and pieces overlap and often contradict one another. I use drawing to help me see patterns and connections better. Drawing also helps me untangle processes or ideas.

When I say drawing, I mean I’m creating a picture, a figure, a graphic (or a combination of all three) to simplify a complex concept as a snapshot. When you’re given five minutes and four slides in a PowerPoint presentation to explain a sweeping history, a body of conflicting evidence, and a suite of recommendations for how to move forward, you get pretty good at honing essentials.

But I’ve oversimplified how this is done.

Getting to essentials is a process of creating a lot of different graphical (and text) forms so that each time I work through it, I’m understanding my material differently, more deeply…and, I think, most importantly, for me, I begin to understand the material enough to communicate it to another person (an audience, a reader).

I have found similar methods helpful for creative writing projects, assisting me to see patterns and connections, but also, generating new ideas, connections, or images when I’m stuck.

I’m still in the beginning phase of creative writing, so my skill level remains stubbornly low—the raw materials and meanings I’ve generated in my own writings…well, I haven’t developed an ability to understand what it is I want to say, well enough, to be able to communicate it clearly to a reader. Practice. Practice.

But the following “drawing” methods help…drawing as in drawing out (of chaos, a fog, or confusion).

Here is the first in a series of posts outlining non-writer (ish) methods to see and arrange text differently (for deeper meaning making, understanding, to provoke variations in perspective, draw connections from disparate elements, and generate new thinking about your own writing or another’s).

Colour-coding

One way to do this is by highlighting, using a variety of colours, different aspects of written text to chunk out various elements of craft: dialogue, emotions or mood, word repetitions, abstract words, metaphors, back story, etc. I was introduced to this technique in a workshop with Rachel Thompson and I have also written about how Douglas Glover applies this technique to analyze craft styles. When you hold the text away from you, squinting your eyes to blur the words and looking only at the splotches of colour and how they hang together (or not), you can see how the various components relate to one another in a piece, whether any patterns are illuminated, or any other resonances.

I’m still at the stage of learning to do this in other writers’ texts so I can teach myself how to do this better in my own work. It is a slow, but gratifying, endeavour.

To take this idea into a less two-dimensional space and enable working with aspects of text more physically, consider using coloured index cards on which to jot down quick summaries of different structural elements of a larger work, for example: cultural references; reflections; speculative projections; historical references; theme elements, etc. These are examples of higher-level structural elements; of course, one could drill down to more detailed craft levels like those listed above, especially in a shorter work. The idea here is to arrange the coloured cards on a wall (I use the floor) in the order they have been created or written (or the order you think they should go in), and then start to shift them around. Arrange and rearrange and ask yourself these questions:

How does meaning change when the patterns of coloured index cards change?
What vibrations start to hum when certain elements are placed side by side – does a different meaning emerge from the space between?
When does a repeated pattern start to become boring? When does predictable become uninteresting? Or, at what point will a reader drop this and go find something more exciting to do?

…one must be able to find a plot, a route, a “solution”.
Italo Calvino on Invisible Cities, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art No. 8 (Spring/Summer 1983 ), pp. 37-42.

This method helps “see” a path, a solution. Or it can open a door into creating something else.

I started this latter technique for a writing project, a longer form CNF work I’m working on now, thinking it would help me to uncover a structure or a pattern I could use to write into (ha ha fast track my writing, no dice). But I implemented it too soon (always jumping ahead of myself). Instead, I’m challenging myself to generate more foundational material before I launch into this bird’s eye view and structural playfulness.

Next up in this series (next month): Mind Maps