Upside Down Writing

One of the most mind-blowing creativity exercises I ever experienced was taught to me in a drawing class.  The teacher, employing the wonderful book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, instructed us to “simply” draw what we literally saw, not the symbols of what we saw.  The use of symbols to represent complex objects is a survival mechanism of the brain, the left hemisphere primarily.  It has to take those shortcuts in order to keep us moving one foot before the next in an overwhelmingly sensational world.  For example, what your brain has stored as a depiction of the object “tree” is just the basic primary components; a trunk, branches, leaves.  Those become what a “tree” is.  So when we see that object before us and are told to draw it, it’s the symbols of the thing that get called up and copied – we don’t draw what is actually there at all.

It’s fascinating really; developmental science abounds with these examples of how we learn, how we store massive amounts of information in our brains.  To a child, all little four-legged furry creatures are “doggy”; all females for a time are filed away as “mommy.”  We learn to expand and refine later, but it’s how we

are hard-wired to learn and to store.  The downside of that of course is that the world becomes so much smaller, everything reduced to a label and a symbol of the thing itself, which is in reality infinitely unique in the universe. 

The symbol-busting exercise to push through all that hard-wiring was to take a picture of an object, let’s say that tree, and turn it upside down.   You’re faced with a mass of unrecognizable lines, shapes, colors, and shadows, and that’s what you draw;

what you really see, what is actually there.  Draw the dark spaces, the light, the lines, all the shading, all of what’s in between, the negative space.  It ‘feels’ so different – a palpable sensation – almost drug-like.  It’s ‘that side’ of the brain,

front and center for a change in the driver’s seat; a wonderful state.  It short-circuits the brain from taking the automatic shortcut to the symbolic representation of “tree”, as it is no longer recognizable to the brain as a tree.

It is life-changing, honestly.  You are compelled to really see, to perceive what’s actually there.  When you’re done and turn it back over, your brain lobes collide in a wonderful confusion of recognition – you just drew a tree, an actual tree, without even “knowing” it.  You can physically feel the surprised outrage, the sheer confusion moving around up there, the left brain protesting ‘what the hell just happened?!’ as the right sidles up and says softly, “I got it, trust me.  See?  It turned out alright.”  If you can allow that amazing process to unfold, miracles happen.  It’s working the process instead of the goal.   Well, writing must be the same.  I wrote previously about the joy of outlining, putting everything in beatific OCD order.  But of course you have to have something first in order to be able to sort it.  Often when I set out to write, the end goal, the purpose of the piece, becomes the focus.  I write a template, put myself on assignment, and all those rigid essay writing rules from grammar school surge forth.  It must be blocked out in labeled parts, vetted and

approved, the pre-ordained format dictating everything.  That’s stifling, a representation of writing; the symbol of the thing, not the heart and process itself.  All the books I’ve read label the process part differently; right brain, free writing, morning pages, ad infinitum.  I call it the Flow.  It’s movement, it’s being in it – the eye of the storm with access to all the energy surrounding.  Things come together so easily when there.  It’s a magical place to be, a miraculous state to achieve. 
 
It’s turning writing upside down.

And we must turn writing on its head and write what we “see” in there, instead of a representation of the thing.  Follow the flow, chase down sparks and see what they ignite, don’t have a goal, ramble, take side paths, explore, play, meander, blatantly ignore ‘the rules’, gently hold the left aside, tell it ‘I got this for a while.  I’ll need you later, not now, go take a break’.  And just flow.  When it’s spent, turn it back over right side up, dust it off in editing, and be amazed at what has emerged.  You will find ‘you’ in there – your true voice that can’t ever be duplicated, your unique ‘wordprint’ in the universe.  It wants to come out, but can’t when only allowed out on a leash.  It has to run free or it will never actualize. 

Upside Down Writing Exercise:
Find a neutral quiet place like a closet, and turn off all your senses except hearing in any way possible.  Plug your nose, put a blindfold over your eyes, don’t reach out to touch, just listen – put any setting context out of your mind,

let the creative brain fully emerge.  Allow that you could be anywhere – on alien soil, inside a vacuum, an air hanger, the moon, a railway station – anywhere at all.  You’ve just come out of a time machine and all your senses are rendered useless except hearing, which is all there is in this world.  You can’t see, smell, touch, or taste anything at all and you don’t know where you’ve landed.  All of a sudden you hear a noise, and all of your being leans into that noise – the entirety of the universe in that moment is that

sound.  Locate it, latch on to it and devote yourself to it.  Really listen without any of the interference of the other senses imposing their filtration, or your brain providing its infamous shortcut labeling; there is no context to prejudice your interpretation of what it should be.  It’s just you and a sound, pure, unadulterated.  Now – what do you hear?  Don’t search for symbols, pre-existing constructs, of what a noise like that might be.  That’s futile – none of those symbols, like bird, wind, cat, construction noise, exist in this world.  Just allow the noise to be.  Describe it.  You can do this exercise with all the senses.  Block the others, and using just one at a time describe what that sense is experiencing without context, information or interference.

This is what happens when your ‘imagination runs away with you’ – in the middle of the night you’re alone, you hear a strange noise that wrenches you from your sleep, from your other world of dreams, that in-between hypnogogic state.  The noise, without any solid context, becomes enormous, terrifying.  You either huddle under the covers petrified the rest of that long night, hyper alert for any sound, the brain in manic overtime desperately trying to sort and identify.  Or, maybe in trepidation you expose one bare foot from under the covers, the other reluctantly following.  Holding your breath, using all your senses

to help restore familiarity, touching the walls of the hallway, the chairs, your brave feet lead you to the source of the unknown.  Finally, there’s the light switch and in the blinding life-altering blaze, all context is restored, the pieces physically, audibly, gratefully, scurry to restore reality, and The Answer is triumphantly borne aloft, paraded through every sense that’s been on full red alert – “It’s the damn cat.”  It’s the damn cat who, using her own special super-senses, had leapt on to the kitchen counter to have a late night nuzzle with the pervasively dripping sink faucet, obliviously contemptuous of the dishes she knocked about.  She looks at you with rapidly diminishing

pupils in the blinding light; offended, condescending.  “Really, again?  You still can’t tell it’s me after all these years?  You can’t just smell me?  Pathetic human.”  In your flood of relief – I mean what would you have really done

anyway had it turned out to be … something else? - you don’t remind the damn cat of the innumerable times she’s torn through the house to dive under the bed in utter panic and terror every single time the doorbell rings. 

Why do we have to find out so desperately, to the extent we would even be able to push through that sheer state of raw primitive terror?  Because not knowing is infinitely worse.  Our minds ‘run away’ on us, keep going with the infinitely horrific things that noise could be until it’s absolutely unbearable.  We push through the terror

because the unknown will continue to grow and mutate if unchecked.  We ‘let our imaginations get the best of us’ is how we put it.  Well – that is precisely what we’re aiming for as writers, isn’t it?  This exercise is a way to harness that wild ride of unfettered imagining – without the stark terror, or having to deal with patronizing cats.  Enjoy!