Freewriting your way back to poetry

A friend is emerging blinking from depression’s dark cave, and she wonders how she might ease herself back into writing poetry. It’s a place I’ve been, too, but luckily not for many years.

When it takes a feat of superhuman strength merely to put one, then two, feet on the floor, writing can be forced far down on one’s list of priorities. Finding your way back from that state of mind can leave the bucket in the writing well empty.

Regardless of the reason for not writing, when long absence from the page makes it hard to get the words out, freewriting may be the best way to ease back in. This practice—writing whatever comes to mind for a specified short period of time, without stopping and without censorship—puts words on paper, and … presto! The hex of the blank page is overcome. Freewriting replaces the white with words.

The problem then is that most of the words freewriting gives us aren’t usually very illuminating. There are clichés and false starts and overwritten passages; there is nonsense, and there are even moments when the composition process eases into the text. (“God, this stuff is bad. But I said I’d write for five minutes, and damn it, I have one minute and fourteen seconds left to go. Eleven. Seven. I like pie.”)

The key to freewriting is to hold the pen in your hand and move your arm. Freewriting gives your arm permission to write things that are embarrassingly stupid. It's OK, see—it's just your arm doing the work, not you.

What the freewriting provides is material to sift through. If you followed the rules—if you kept going, going, filling two pages or more—the next step, when poetry is the goal, is to go through the dross with your pan and look for those nuggets that stand out. These you transpose onto a new page, and you massage them—tightening the language, putting them in some kind of order, and seeing what it is you have.

If all you do is put several good lines together on a page, in most cases, you’re still closer to having a poem than if you had set out to Write A Poem.

This suggestion is specifically intended for poets who are coming back to writing after a long absence. It is not intended for those who are actively suffering from depression or any other health issue that has them sidelined. I’m just not sure that the guilt and loss of self that accompany periods without writing are best tackled with any remedy while we’re still in the throes of illness. Freewriting in the midst of depression can take us to very bleak places. The practice could lead to healing, or it could lead to pain. If you are depressed, the best thing to do is the thing you can do. Sometimes brushing your teeth is more valuable and life-affirming than writing poetry, and the main job of someone with depression is to find a way back into the sunlight.

Depression steals almost everything from a writer—confidence, energy, inspiration, flow. What it doesn’t steal is language—that great muddler and sense-maker and imp that always inhabits us, and that, when we are healthy, finds a sheet of paper and a pen nearly irresistible. When we’re ultimately ready, we may find that we have temporarily lost a writer’s muscle memory, the most direct path to the well, but what we haven’t lost is our ability to make meaning, or to put words side-by-side so they can start to make meaning for us.

Photo courtesy of AnnaMae22 at DeviantArt.