CULTIVATING CHAOS

HOW TO ENLIVEN YOUR WRITING EVERY DAY ...

Hello Everyone,

As a fellow writer, I want to encourage you to make a mess—to allow your work to unspool in unpredictable, organic ways; to welcome what surprises and disturbs you. Over controlling your writing in it early stages often kills the spontaneous gifts that come with the embrace of what we only dimly perceive, of the mysterious and the random that can so enliven our work.

We can’t always describe this mystery, this wildness, but we recognize it: the strange, ineluctable, jagged-edged power of the wonderfully, dangerously unexpected. The feeling that the world, as we thought we knew it, has irrevocably changed. It might be a single image, or a startling convergence of events, or a devastating utterance that, for an instant, illuminates a character.

Great prose and poetry are replete with these moments, moments that alter our perceptions and challenge us, as the poet Simon Ortiz says, to “the vastness we do not enter.” How do we enter this vastness of unknowing and emerge with fresh, unexpected writing?

Through the prompts and questions of craft soon to come, the plan is to cultivate mystery, invite it into our writing, harness the wildness without domesticating its energies. Join me in creating work from a sense of mission, and discovery, and relentless curiosity. And learn how to do this consistently enough to make a lasting, vivid difference in your writing. 

Abrazos,

Cristina