Tag: create

An Invitation

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.

Shifting World Views & Learning Different Ways of Knowing

Suzanne Biro

In the past, a shift in how I viewed the world happened quite literally. I travelled to New Zealand over twenty-five years ago and discovered a large world map with New Zealand at its centre. Up until that point, my education and experiences about what the earth looked like and where the continents were located in relation to one another was depicted with two views (remember, this is before Google maps). The first was on a globe whose axis tilted away from my body and fastened to a stand. The attached points of axis bisected the north and southern poles, focusing spinning attention to the northern hemisphere (Europe, Russia (USSR), North America, half the world’s oceans). If I had to find New Zealand, the country where my mother was born, I needed to bend upside down to see it.

The other world view was a flat, two-dimensional map, the sort that gets tacked up on bedroom walls or ceremonially unrolled to obscure the chalkboard at the front of classrooms.  On these maps the Americas (North and South) are rendered on the left-hand side and Europe, Africa, Russia, Asia, Australia (and New Zealand) on the right-hand side.  The Pacific Ocean is split (so one doesn’t quite appreciate how vast it is) and the Atlantic Ocean takes over the middle ground.

On the map I discovered in New Zealand so many years ago, the two tiny islands commanded the middle space and suddenly I appreciated how far away the country really is from most of the other continents, floating there in a large blue pool (the Pacific Ocean). In the NZ maps I was stunned to discover how close Russia and Alaska are to each other (the western tip of Cape Prince of Wales in Alaska is 88.5 kilometers (55 miles) from the Southern point of Cape Dezhnev in Russia – if I were driving this distance across the Bering Strait, it would take me less than an hour!). And with this realization my mind moved through a reshuffling of Cold War history and Canada’s shared responsibility with the US for continental air defense through NORAD (North American Air Defense Command).

Of course, with Google maps available at our fingertips these days, my naive view of geography and related epiphany is outdated. My point is that I had accepted these two views of the world “presented” to me without questioning the perspective (and possible motives) of their presentations. I’ll get back to this thought shortly.

Another map and another example. This time focusing on the north-east region of North America (Ontario, Quebec, the Atlantic provinces, the states along the eastern seaboard, the southern shores of the great lakes, lining the Mississippi River and other confluences and tributaries – the water here is important). This map, a map free of border lines (province, state, or country), depicted the diversity of Indigenous languages with coloured circles of concentration. Sometimes the colours overlapped, indicating mixed languages in regions, but on that map (a simplified version from the picture below), it was instantly clear how Indigenous languages mirrored waterways (water being an essential human resource). Again, I experienced a mind-bending reshuffling to appreciate how cultures depend and thrive in relation to land and water. But also, how superficial country (province and state) borders are. Crayon lines drawn by Kings and Queens, heads of state. Crayon lines our loved ones fight for and die on. Crayon lines that shift and move, depending on which resource they’re circling, gold, uranium, olive groves, copper, waterfalls, coal, legislation, policy, justice, freedom, the list goes on.

From Native Land Digital https://native-land.ca/

What does this have to do with creative writing practice?  Well, a lot actually.  It’s a bit of a conceptual leap, yes, but bear with me.  The way we carve categories in the world around us, be they continents, countries, or the way we name the world with words, impacts the way we “see” the world, how our perceptions are influenced.  Words matter – they determine how we think.

These quotes from a recently published piece by Christine Kenneally in the

Scientific American November 2023 Issue:

“Culture shapes language because what matters to a culture often becomes embedded in its language, sometimes as words and sometimes codified in its grammar. Yet it is also true that in varying ways a language may shape the attention and thoughts of its speakers. Language and culture form a feedback loop, or rather they form many, many feedback loops.”

“…the more we ask empirical questions about language and its many loops in all the world’s languages, the more we will know about the diverse ways there are to think like a human.”

I need to reread David Abram’s astounding book The Spell of the Sensuous which explores similar ideas, comparing Western language development to Indigenous ones.  A review of the book written by Émile H. Wayne offers this distillation:

“When our ways of thinking and knowing are rooted in the actual soil of our actual communities…we are called out into the world where we meet, in every bodily sense, the consequences of our own actions. Non-human nature becomes present, aware, vocal, integral to our being. We find ourselves living not in the midst of our abstractions – nation-states, linguistic group, political party – but as members of a living, breathing, often suffering, body of relations.”

For these reasons (and others – this post is too long already), I have started to learn Anishinaabemowin with the Kingston Indigenous Language Nest. I would like to better understand how Indigenous Peoples of the land on which I learn and live name and view the world. I want to expand my worldview.

I would be remiss if I failed to name an additional world view shift I am making. This month, I made the very difficult but courageous decision to leave my marriage. Quite simply, I want to be independent. This is the language I have been using. I do not feel I am leaving my husband…we are bound to one another through our children and the life we have created together, both in the past and the one we create in the future. Our relationship shifts – it is my hope we remain friends who love each other. It is a painful separation. I am blessed to be surrounded by people who love and hold me, keep me floating. Writing my way through is helping. Also art. And songs. And lifting the Dahlias from the soil to overwinter. I’m not sure what garden they will be planted in next year, but they are waiting in the dark. Kind of like me.

I have been learning names of animals in the Anishinaabemowin classes I began. We learn as children do, with songs and games. It’s fun. The other night, I discovered a gray tree frog in my kitchen. It’s the first time in close to twenty years of living in this house that I have found a frog within. Agoozimakakii is the Ojibway (a dialect of Anishinaabemowin) word for tree frog. Phonetically it is pronounced: ah-goh-say-mah-kah-ki. Today I am leaving this house, this home…when I looked up the spiritual meaning of finding a tree frog in one’s house, I discover it’s “a symbol of transformation…In some Native American traditions, the frog is seen as a guide who can help individuals transition between different stages of life.”

I had a hard time catching the poor wee thing, the heart shaped tree frog slightly smaller than the palm of my hand. She was fast and strong, and she hopped from my hands several times, landing with splats on the linoleum.  Finally, I cupped her in my palms and placed her back outside under our exquisite moon, its light making our skins glow.

I have opened the borders of my soul with these moves, these shifts, expanding my view of the world with new perspectives. I aim for Mino Bimaadiziwin, an Anishinaabemowin phrase meaning “to live the good life” in a wholistic sense – “the intelligence of the mind is inspired and informed from the intelligence of the heart.” It is terrifying, but also, feels exactly right.

Be brave – Aakode’ewin. In the Anishinaabe language, this word literally means “state of having a fearless heart.” So, this is how I step into this new-to-me kaleidoscopic landscape and learn to name the world.

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

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.   

A poke in the wound

Suzanne Biro
WordPress will not allow this image to be the right way up…perhaps it’s better posted this way …moving against gravity.

Making art when there is war. It feels wrong. Or useless. Selfish. I spiral into guilt and shame about my privilege, my luck. In the boundaries of my skin, my brain, the sorrow seeps. 

There are mountains of sorrow at the heart of all conflicts. The fired heat of hurts hoisted through generations, coded, we now know, in our DNA, and patterned far too comfortably in memory. 

Russia and the Ukraine, China and Taiwan, the continued killing in the Middle East, too many countries in Africa, we speak of warring geographies as if they are sentient beings themselves rather than the individual people, plants, animals, collected and hurting beneath? Behind? Within? the skins of borders. 

Bodies of power in the shape of countries, in the shape of cities, in lake shaped wounds, in fist shaped educations, in the curved shape of a parent’s spine twisting from a child’s longing for love. 

This is a habit of mine: to speak in abstractions, to hide behind the illusions of words, to climb my mountain of sorrow instead of burying deep within it to try and understand. 

What is it I’m trying to say? 

That I feel so very sad.  That I wish humans could be better. That I wish I would do better. That I could truly believe that making art, which is to say making love, creating love, holding love, sharing love, could save us.    

Even if it is so hard to believe when fire rains down from the skies, I must.

Crack(s)

Suzanne Biro

I am a month or so out from completing a six-week online writing course. Another one. 

I attend a couple of writing courses each year. A friend quips I’m addicted to them…as if they are a bad habit, or a catchy disease. 

I do love them.  

But my friend’s analogy is not far from the mark.  It needles. 

The weeks following a class are rough. I feel hung over. The sudden loss of structured deadlines induces the same vertigo one gets at the midpoint of a swing bridge…petrified by the choice of moving forward or going back, with all the freedom to simply tumble sideways and fall, fall fall.  

The classes inject fresh creativity. My own writing spools effortlessly from the instructor’s prompts and exercises, surprising me always, pleasing me frequently. I love reading the diverse interpretations of the prompts, and the variety of voices from other writers in the class. 

The act of reading to comment on other people’s writing forces me to engage intimately with their words, their sentences, their paragraphs, their structures. It’s an intellectual exercise that teaches me a lot about my own writing (and thinking) and how it might be improved. It also challenges me to use a framework of positivity, consciously eschewing the traditional critique approach that points out all the wrongs or picks apart a piece error by error.   

But most enslaving—and this is where the shame seeps in—I crave the focused feedback about my own writing from my peers. I long for their comments. I’m curious about the phrases they are drawn to, about the places they feel stuck, about learning how I might improve my language, pacing, punctuation, structure, atmosphere, metaphors. This level of scrutiny detects and signals what may be missing. 

So why the shame? 

I’m addicted to the feeling of confirmation. I have such a hot desire to be seen, to be heard. To be loved? I’m supposed to be writing simply for the joy of writing, without any need for validation. The art ought be an end unto itself.  

But that’s not right either is it? 

Writing is communication.  One does not write simply to put words on a page, fold the notebook closed and shove it in the back of a drawer.  Though, most (all?) of my own writing suffers this fate.   

Writing to share becomes a dialogue with the power to transcend time and space.  Writing stuff down transforms thoughts to an object I can hold in my fist, paper or book, and hand it over to others. Here, I’ve dumped this beautiful tangle of words on this paper, what do you think?  The difference is that the reader has no obligation to the writer.  The reader may take and walk away.  The reader must only feel entertained, provoked, and, one hopes, inspired.  There is no contract a reader must respond. 

So, the writer must learn to create in isolation. Must learn to dialogue with oneself.  And this ought to be enough.  For an addict, enough never is.   

Go Deeper

Suzanne Biro

Last week, writer Lauren Groff tweeted this: “Recently, at every single class visit, some new writer asks me why short stories are so depressing and I usually just fumble an answer about how stories need conflict and tend to be written in a minor key (as opposed to the novel’s span of keys). But honestly, I don’t know.”

This intrigued me.  Of course, twitter is not the right medium for a conversation…it can’t contain the nuance, gesture and tone tools enacted through speech.  These tools we use (and need) to properly grasp and share meaning. Short stories incorporate these tools through craft. And though twitter can promote expansion by provoking further questions: what does depressing mean? Do students ask this question implying depressing stories are no good?  What does Lauren Groff mean by minor key? And, how lovely is that, describing a novel as a span of keys? But on twitter, debate is polarised, appreciation of nuance is non-existent, and rhetoric lands heavy.   

Lauren Groff’s recent story Wind, published in the New Yorker, is a stunning short story that is most definitely “not happy”. The story could serve as the very definition of “not happy”. But I would not call it depressing. The story holds a horrible truth up to the light and makes us (the reader) see and experience its facets of terror and violence and love. (And yes, these constructs frequently share the same bed.) Calling it depressing is an indication the reader has not engaged in the deeper work of questioning our reactions to the story. For stories, written as works of art, are tiny calls to action. Even if that action is a way to tip our minds toward different ways of thinking. Or feeling. Even for a moment.

Lauren Groff’s story Wind is a call to action: to be an active witness to violence against women. The story provokes the question: is witnessing enough?  And goes on to answer that question: absolutely not. The story raises a mirror to show us our participation as simple witness: participation through non action; participation through acceptance. And yes, that makes us feel depressed. But here’s the thing, the story is told through the eyes of a child. This ratchets up the emotional tone, and the fear is visceral. But this point of view does more work: it forces the reader into an innocent perspective…signalling a chance to learn, to experience—to change our minds. And the brilliance of this short story (although, like a diamond, her story’s brilliance has so many facets), is that the narrator begins from the point of view of an adult remembering an episode in her childhood…so…the story is inviting us, as adults, to engage deeper consideration, but from a compassionate stance…an understanding that even as adults, our knowledge in this issue is underdeveloped. We are given a chance to expand our thinking.  And this may never be named “depressing”.  

Narratively, stories do need conflict. Otherwise, they don’t really move and might be better represented as a sculpture. Or a photograph.  I believe Lauren Groff hit upon the answer herself by inserting a music analogy. Think of how many sad songs (lyrics) are layered over beautiful music?  This is what art is.  And what it does.  It uses a medium to move us. To tilt our minds. To help us experience a point of view outside our own. It becomes so much more satisfying when it explores complexity by creating a “thing” that we too can explore and experience a symphony of meaning. 

Like Lauren Groff’s students, I am learning. And when a story strikes us as depressing, it is a little poke of a reminder to ask ourselves why we react this way? Deeper reading of “depressing” short stories helps us hear that minor key. Helps us understand how it fits into the larger song of our lives. And love.   

I see you there, in the dark: thank you.

Suzanne Biro

Early morning writing—this last week or so—I’ve heard an owl hooting from somewhere close in the backyard.  It’s wonderful listening to its song of wisdom calling out from the dark. 

A common cultural impression of the writing life is that it’s a lonely, solitary endeavor. I guess the hours of actual writing can be like that (though, I like the solitary time…I don’t find it isolating in the least). But this is a myth. Really, there is too much encouragement and inspiration offered from fellow creators to be discounted.  

In this same week of listening to the owl’s song, I’ve had wonderful email correspondences about creative process with a playwright, a poet, a concert pianist, and four other writers (four!).  A songwriter shared one of his songs via digital file; a film maker one of his films via FB messenger (the wonders of social media). What gifts!! I walked and talked with an artist (painter), a weekly routine that has become essential, not just for discussing artistic pursuits, but for nourishing my soul and my heart and our friendship. I’ve sat and discussed process with another dear friend while she knit a rainbow-striped heel into a wool sock the colour of an ocean in a storm.  

Also, always, inspiration and encouragement from poems I’ve stumbled across and words gleaned from others’ meanderings in books.  This week: Ross Gay’s beautiful collection of tiny essays, The Book of Delights, poems by Laura Gilpin and Bukowski, and a collection of fables edited by Rawi Hage, Lisa Moore and Madeleine Thien. 

Flip to the acknowledgements section of any book and you will see there are paragraphs (pages!) of people to thank for their contribution to the pages one holds in one’s hands.  The songs calling out from the dark.  

One does not glide to glory without a supportive wind.  The creators and makers (all of you – mechanics, gardeners, bread bakers, chefs etc.) I know, and continue to meet while pursuing my art, expand this glistening net[work] to enrich my life beyond the beyond.  I know I’m blessed by your words and thoughts and I’m grateful your gifts help my own writing to swoop and soar on beating wings.  

By Hand

Suzanne Biro

I like to write by hand.  It took a while to build up the muscles in my fingers and my hand when I first started out because different muscles are being used compared to typing on a keyboard.  I was never very fast on keyboards anyway.  When I first started writing seriously, in a notebook, my hand cramped and the letters were large and loopy. Still, legible.

In high school, when my friends signed up for typing class (in those days it was on a typewriter), my father, who rarely weighed in on such matters, ordered: you will not take typing, you will take law. Turns out you can teach yourself to type fairly quickly…but it looks ugly…and I stare at the letter keys instead of the screen, dancing my hands backwards and forwards in what I’m sure is a most inefficient pattern. Ah well.  

Writing by hand is freeing in a way that typing on a keyboard isn’t.  A screen is a bordered two-dimensional space, whereas working with a physical page of paper, though still flat, I can draw arrows and pictures and write sideways or backwards or upside down, cramming words into a tiny shape in a margin, or expanding letters into a material emphasis. And there’s the advantage of seeing your progress: the pages slowly fill, front to back, and a page becomes a pile of pages and soon, a filled notebook.  It’s satisfying in a way that an icon of a file on your desktop could never be.  

But there’s another distinction I don’t quite understand, and it’s instinctual: writing by hand helps me to think differently as I create.  It’s as if my thinking is more three (even four?) dimensional.  On the computer, the sentences wind one after another linearly.  And the delete key gets more of a workout than my penned cross-outs.  I’m more forgiving of my “wrong direction thoughts” when I write by hand.  But that’s good, because often there’s something bubbling up from the subconscious when we write, and it might appear in the margins or beneath a cross-out line but can never recover the fatal depression of the delete key.  

Writing by hand is similar to drawing in many ways. 

Writing by hand matches the speed of my thoughts…I can transcribe my thinking more easily by hand. 

My husband’s uncle wrote a number of books, all by hand (transcription services were expensive, so one didn’t waste the money on a product that wasn’t quite finished).  He used a large room and placed his handwritten papers on tables around the room, physically shuffled them from corner to corner and often used scissors to cut and stick paragraphs into place with scotch tape.  I wonder if this physical immersion in one’s work enables you to know your work, your process and your progress differently.  Only one way to find out I guess…

William Faulkner disregarded his wife’s wishes and outlined his novel, A Fable (1954), on the walls of his study, handwriting directly on the paint!

Here’s a picture of Joseph Heller’s handwritten outline of his novel Catch 22. 

Handwriting from 2012 on the left & handwriting from 2020 on the right…doesn’t look all that different.

A Shaky Devotion

Suzanne Biro

Sometimes, the right words of encouragement arrive at the point when you most need them. 

In writing workshops, when pressed to write (without thinking too much) in response to creative writing prompts, my writing reveals some beautiful phrases that retain spontaneous energy and emotional authenticity, the magic every writer wishes for. I believe in these small beauties…they embody a promise: I can produce good work.  

I’ve been trying to cultivate the same playfulness, the letting go, in my regular writing practice.  For the first few years, it seemed easy (easier?). But, the more I study the craft, the more I practice and revise, the more I read and read to understand the deeper aspects of literary technique…well, the harder it is, it seems for me, to echo the spirited performance on the page.   

I’ve contracted, what Philip Pullman so accurately diagnoses in his essay, Heinrich von Kleist: “On the Marionette Theatre”, subtitled, Grace Lost and Regained, a “self-consciousness” in my writing.  Through knowledge, I’ve lost the “wonderful freedom and expressiveness—the natural grace—[children] bring to such things as painting [writing]”.  I’m verklempt.

And I’ve been lamenting and grieving the loss…mourning I will never regain my original (and beautiful and spontaneous) innocence. 

I’m stuck in the gap perfectly articulated by Ira Glass: 

“What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.

But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit.

Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.

Ira Glass

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Philip Pullman’s essay intensifies Glass’s gap to illuminate my short-sighted grief over the loss of childish creative abandon: “if we want the wisdom that comes with experience, we have to leave the innocence behind.”  

What is most encouraging though, and has lifted a weight from my shoulders I hadn’t realised I was carrying, Pullman explains, “ …eventually, after great study and toil…[there] will be better, deeper, truer, more aware, in every way richer than…[what one] could achieve [as] a child.”

And then this in my email inbox (there’s no mistaking serendipity), Robert McKee’s latest update about the reality of writing story:

“No matter your chosen medium, remember this: it will take you ten years to master your art…It takes many years of work, but the disciplined writer knows that given determination and study, the puzzle of story yields.” 

Robert McKee

Prescription: keep working. 

Rabbit holes and Wormholes

Suzanne Biro

Wrestling “time” again this week [1].  I have only myself to blame, climbing into the ring with too many opponents under the guise of some super woman with a cape that’s quickly fraying.  

I’ve hit another bad patch of resistance in my writing.  These weekly posts are beginning to highlight patterns of behaviour I’m good at ignoring.  Example? When creativity becomes difficult, I make myself so busy I can’t face it.  Spirals of dark descending and self-loathing [2].   I’m trying to work through it. This is process too. 

Deep breath. Look outwards for inspiration and it will find you.  Fill you.  This week a few superb finds as I let myself fall down the rabbit hole into the warren of the internet:

Brevity’s nonfiction blog [3] featured a most beautiful visual essay created by Nina Gaby.  I love how her essay looks on the page with muted pastels and transparent paper bits that make the whole thing feel ephemeral.  And I love her sense of humour and play that rolls off the type-written statements like we’re sharing a laugh together.  I love that she loves James Brown. 

On her own website, a gallery of Nina Gaby’s artwork is well worth the visit: soft folds of porcelain with a variety of media.  Inspiring. Gorgeous.

Roving over Nina Gaby’s visual essay, I come across her suggestion #6: Read Brian Doyle’s “Playfullnessless”. So, a few clicks later I’m reading a piece by a writer who always makes me cry and laugh.  Brian Doyle passed away (too young!) a few years ago and I discovered it’s possible to mourn the loss of someone you have never met or known in real life.  I miss his writings.  And here, a piece I hadn’t come across before, fresh and new and fun, published on Welcome Table Press (with several more inspiring works on the essay form).  

I start to question why I’m trying (essaying) to write fiction when non-fiction would be so much the better fit for working through my shit.  Brian Doyle makes a good case. 

And on the Welcome Table Press I follow the link in a red banner on the top of the webpage to (un)common sense, a digital chapbook|for times that try one’s soul.  The universe is listening! And I descend into reading…and I’ve moved through an invisible wormhole, from feeling dark to feeling better.  

I’m also reading Kyo Maclear’s gorgeous memoir Birds Art Life and it is full of passages I wish I could tear off and eat and embody [4].  Passages like this one: 

“I understand.  I understand getting stuck.  I understand wanting to make a change while circling around the same neural cage.  I understand that sometimes, when you are at a stage of life when you have given yourself over to mothering and daughtering and you get to keep very little of yourself, it can be hard to live with open doors.  Yet in an effort to hoard solitude and keep people out, there is a risk that all you end up doing is fencing yourself in.”

Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life (page 47)

[1] Can I start a paragraph with a gerund?

[2] annoying analyst notes: don’t worry, not THAT bad.  It just feels good to write these lines.  A colleague at work suggested it’s the shortening daylight and that I should get a lamp to sit in front of.  Good idea…

[3] I regularly read this blog/online lit mag and it’s always fulfilling, inspiring.  I suggest subscribing if you don’t already.  It’s free!! 

[4] inner critic notes: ok, that’s really weird.