Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
The first time I came to a writer’s class is this class where we are being offered prompts to get us going. So I am writing about this first time experience with 2B pencil. I always write with a pencil because it feels nice and is easily erased. This possibility of erasure dulls the sense of exposure. This is clearly a pre-computer belief. Bringing this belief into high relief exposes the litter of terrible beliefs that still the hand of all my creativity.
I must be ready, for I am learning fast today. This has come along at the right time – timing has been good in my life so far, so don’t waste this good timing here. In order that I make the most of this, the wild and free mind just put together two aphorisms from the class – “create bricks don’t build a bridge” and “shit or get off the pot”. That adds up to “shit a brick” an expression of surprise – so solid and concrete yet the mind which is floating the idea is fluid and ephemeral. Such a strange marriage of concrete and fluidity, is the world of words.
I am now waiting for the next prompt. Where will it take me and isn’t it strange that I need that prompt right now. Are all stories like this story, pegged on prompts I ask myself? Prompts in the theatre are used to remind actors of what they already know but have momentarily forgotten. I haven’t forgotten my lines. I don’t know what they are. But here they come.
It was warm outside and it is warm inside this room in the kind of way that happens when everyone is in the same boat and is willing to say it out loud and take risks. We know that the wanting-to-write boat is populated with its own demons – procrastination, fear, varying beliefs of inferiority, beliefs that writers come fully formed with no evolution, that there is no time and that we need special conditions.
I must try to let all of these go. And now I am feeling the difference between trying and actually letting go. I am not trying now, I am writing, this is not the sort of effort that will let me down or will invite the band of demons back.
And finally, there is no finally apart from death. Life and writing merge with their offers, retractions, surprises, and devastations. This is a way to live and to write into the great heart of being.