Getting "Better" at Writing:
By Andy Couturier

Following the wisp of smoke that is coming out of the forest: this is, I propose to you, how you will "learn how to write." Learn how to write "better." The wisp is not a bonfire. Not a brush fire. More like a coil of incense smoke caught in the late afternoon sunlight, coming out from the last trees at the edge of the wood, slanting through it, illuminating it, holy, instantaneous. That kind of wisp of smoke.

And this means discovering the way you uniquely can use language and put together ideas, how you can use your strong suits, can tap into your own internal fertile crescents. For if you can reliably, or at least more and more over time, touch these sumptuous inner regions, and pull language through and from and out of them, then you will be writing something that not only touches and pleases you again and again when you read it (and pleases you as you write it) but also pleases congruent inner places in others.

In all "others"? No. At all times? No. Will it be "better" by someone's standards (an expert)? Maybe, maybe not. But if you trust the universe (and you should), it's likely that the work coming from that place in you will find its way to a place like that in another person. And more reliably so than if you write from a bunch of two-dimensional ideas about proper writing. (And, guess what, you'll also suffer less in writing it if you touch that inner congruence.)

What you do is scatter your seeds out to the wind, and if they're good seeds, and they've been full of what it is that you essentially are, or parts of that, then those seeds will find the places that they germinate and grow. Some will fall on the desert sands or the New Hampshire granite, but even those may someday find their nesting place. The lord moves in mysterious ways.

So what about the wisp of smoke emanating out of the forest then?

Here it is. How do you find that fertile true place? It's a feeling isn't it? Not word for a feeling like "Happy" or "Disgruntled," but a sense of something exact and indefinable, something textured and with a certain shape and speed and viscosity. When you know it, you reach in there time and time again, (and even though it's shifting) you have a sense that you are in touch with this place, or at least standing in its presence. That place will produce writing in congruence with you. And that place of congruence (because you are part of the universe) must by definition touch places in other people, places that will work on them, that will work for them, that will please them, and they will feel the gift of your labors, of your journeys, and they, some of them, will respond with that inarticulate and imprecise language of "It is good."

And the wisp of smoke?

Pay attention to
what you pay attention to.
--David Bayles and Ted Orland

Ok, here it is. Write. Write a lot. Write any which way. Produce words. Keep the pen moving. That's the first part. It is the prerequisite. When you have a lot of words, read them. You can read them to yourself or you can read them to another. If you are reading them to someone else, tell them that you don't want them to fix or suggest or critique. That would be the end of things. Say it several times if they're not a good listener.

So read it out loud, slowly, and without excuse explanation or apology. What you want is for your friend, or what you ask of yourself, is to reflect back to you what they remember from the piece. Anything at all. What does she remember? Stay away from "I liked it, didn't like it, got confused, etc.", just what she remembered, what she responded to.

Now here's the wispy part, the mystical magical dreamy part. Excellent: What you do, as you listen, is you go back in time, in your memory, to the moment just before you wrote that phrase (and that's why we want to read the work soon after it was penned) and feel the feeling. What was the exact shape and texture and form of this feeling, what words were jittering along in the head, what sense, what intuition, what lack, what inner direction did you give yourself? The effort to go back into the mangrove forest of the mind, the swamp, the woods, and find the place that created that startling phrase, that is what will do more for your writing than anything else. Especially if you do it again. And again.

Once you do this a few times, you will easily find a little trail back into that luscious grove where the light shines on the tall grasses and the wildflowers in the clearing. You can go there again. Try the process a few more times, and you can Shloop! right there in an instant. You see now why you don't want to evaluate it as you go? You see why you don't want your friend to try and fix it for you? You see why you don't want to cloud the listener's mind with what you hoped to try and accomplish, or why you aren't quite happy with it yet? Any of those things startles the process, any of those things breaks the trance, any of those things frightens off the gentle and sensitive forest creature without whom you cannot find the way inside.

Then what happens? What is the demonstrable, weighable and measurable result? The writing becomes fuller, as a percentage, becomes more saturated with the kind of wording, the kind of insights, the kind of intention that comes from this glade in the middle of the woods. It rings true more than the stuff which came from the fixer. It finds its way home.