I’ve been reading Susan M. Tiberghien’s One Year to a Writing Life: 12 Lessons to Deepen Every Writer’s Art and Craft. I started it around November of last year and just got around to chapter two (personal essays) yesterday. She gave a thoroughly planned out guide to crafting an essay, one that started with closing your eyes and letting the ideas come to you of their own volition. The next step was to free write the memory into an essay form, but to let your mind “meander,” so as to give the work an opportunity to open up to places you might not have scavenged otherwise. I discovered, in trying to free write, that I am actually quite bad at it. I don’t like to let my mind wander off, ironically, when it comes to my writing. I like to control it. Ball and chain. It turns out, I’m a word bully.
This is a personal problem, and mental/emotional challenge I sorely need to work on. Free writing is supposed to, you know, free you, and my mind wouldn’t have that. I realized this paralleled so many different aspects of my life. Even in my daydreaming/free-thinking (whatever you’d like to call it), I can’t let those thoughts go. I want to control them. I know every person needs to administer a certain degree of mind control, mind you, but as is everything else, too much of something does more harm than good. (However, mind control is handy when someone is trying to feast their eyes on your thoughts, as we all learned in Harry Potter.)
For instance, it’s not good to allow ourselves to think in detail about, say, murdering someone. That is when mind control is a good thing. Trust me when I say that our daydreams slowly build a barrier around our minds the more we give ourselves over to them. I used to daydream all the time and it left me, for years and even still some today, with an idealized perception of the world. I struggle with relinquishing a caustic, romanticized view of life, something that’s left me feeling more mannequin and less human.
With that being said, our minds react variously to different parts of us. In some ways, the mind is its own character. Perhaps my problem isn’t that I have too much control over my mind, but too little. If you think about it, a person with good mind strength can flex and release it like a seasoned equestrian – and that’s without her horse toppling over.
How about you? Do you have trouble free writing?