Demons! A hundred of them.

So, since my last post, I’ve been trying to write by hand more often. I find that when I do it, I get all sorts of great ideas — but I can’t quite get the work to gel into a solid piece. Brainstorming is as far as I can get without a keyboard.

Still, the act of longhand writing has been pleasurable and freeing. I wanted to see if I could find some exercises or themed writing contests, just to give my brainstorming some sort of solid direction. I found a link to Lynda Barry’s most recent book on Aimee Bender’s website.

Friends, I am in love. I do not know how I have gone so long without her. I love love love this brief interview, in which Lynda is very mousy and very cute and she states that most often, as adults, we get stuck when writing because we want to know too much in advance. She suggests we just create as we did as children — unknowing, open, ready to let the story unfold before us.

I found a few sneak peeks of the book’s pages and was instantly inspired to write — and to order the book. (I hope it’ll be here soon!)

I love this blurring of the lines between writing and drawing — to Lynda, the act of creation does not deserve to be placed in a cage.

For some reason, the impulse to sketch for me is mindless and easy — I have never clenched up when feeling the urge to doodle. It’s odd — because I don’t feel the pressure to succeed (and/or to “gain power over my audience,” as Cary Tennis might suggest), drawing/doodling/whatever seems less fraught, less complicated. But I scribbled pages and pages by hand yesterday after reading Lynda’s suggestions! Conflating the various impulses to create seems to be the key to something primal…

What It Is is apparently based on a course Lynda teaches called “Writing the Unthinkable.” Sounds intriguing:

Taking the workshop, which Ms. Barry teaches several times a year, is a bit like witnessing an endurance-performance piece. Aided by her assistant, Betty Bong (in reality, Kelly Hogan, a torch singer who lives in Chicago), Ms. Barry sings, tells jokes, acts out characters and even dances a creditably sensual hula, all while keeping up an apparently extemporaneous patter on subjects like brain science, her early boy-craziness, her admiration for Jimmy Carter and the joys of menopause.

But this is just camouflage for the workshop’s true purpose: to pass on an art-making method that Ms. Barry learned from Marilyn Frasca, her junior- and senior-year art teacher at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

It involves using a random word, like “cars” or “breasts,” to summon a memory in unexpected, filmic detail; writing about it by hand for a set time period (as she says, “Limitation creates structure!”); and then not reading it or talking about it for at least a week. Within the workshop it also involves positive feedback. As students read aloud, Ms. Barry kneels before them, head bowed, listening intently, and says: “Good! Good!” (“I was a kid who was never read to,” she explains.)

Ugh! I want to take this class so bad! Until then, I’ll leave us all with a wonderful exercise, inspired by Lynda’s book One! Hundred! Demons! – but first, some awesome nerdy gossip.

There’s a section in the book where she releases one of her “demons” — an ex-boyfriend. Who reads Lonely Genius Gazette, apparently. (Read this whole chapter — you can find it in the Google Books link above… I love the part about the daddy long legs…)

Guess who it is! Okay, I’ll just tell you — it’s Ira Glass:

“I went out with him. It was the worst thing I ever did. When we broke up he gave me a watch and said I was boring and shallow, and I wasn’t enough in the moment for him, and it was over. I had to go around for a year saying, ‘Am I boring and shallow and not enough in the moment?’”

Okay. Too cute. Ira, I still love you. And enough with these long gossipy blog posts of mine! Try Lynda Barry’s zen demon exercise! Write/paint/collage/whatever about one hundred of your own demons: