How to Bring More Spontaneity, Imperfection, and Risk into Your Writing

My latest article at JMWW is up! Check it out and then read around a bit in the magazine to see if anything inspires you to write. 

HOW TO BRING MORE SPONTANEITY, IMPERFECTION, AND RISK INTO YOUR WRITING:

This article is about not playing fair or being nice.

You're human. You're imperfect. Allow both in your writing. Let's see the struggle, confusion, questioning, disbelief, fear. Make a mess. Yes, you could end up writing 10 poems that end up failing. That's risk. Creativity can't exist without freedom to create anything, including a mess.

Perfect is boring. Perfect is lifeless and flat. Perfect is claustrophobic. Don't connect every dot in your writing, just the key points. An object is stronger for being broken, for having cracks. Let there be cracks and gaps for the reader to enter and fill in on their own. Make leaps in your logic that don't seem logical (but not illogical—there should be a thread of logic). Use a word in the 'wrong' way, a surprising way. Say something crazy. Allow the Freudian slip. Say what you really want to. Free pass. You can edit later. No one is going to grab it out of your hand and send it to the New Yorker and your mother to embarrass you. Allow the unexpected. If any of these happen, leave them and keep going. Let the faucet drip!

Admit you have a problem. Do you keep encountering the same problem in your piece? You can't really see the image you're trying to convey, your lines or sentences are coming out choppy when you'd rather they were long, all of a sudden the poem rhymes or you're slipping in and out of verb tenses, or one character is taking over.

Take another look at what you're calling a problem. This may be the piece telling you what it really needs to be. Go with it. Use another image, let your lines come out short, rhyme to your heart's content. Change your verb tense or your narrator. Stop rowing so hard and just float.

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