My friend, the amazingly talented and wonderful author Elizabeth Rosner, teaches writing retreats. I don’t know what else to call them. She creates a space in her beautiful home for up to 8 writers, and she gives us prompts. These are gentle. They are suggestions. Sometimes she reads us lists of verbs. This time she read us a short poem.
One of the things she talked about this weekend was scaffolding. Scaffolding is the writing you do in order to get to the writing you’ll save. You needed to build it in order to climb up to where you needed to begin. You take it down when you are done, dismantle the scaffolding and take a look at the work. But you would never imagine that just because it isn’t permanent, the scaffolding isn’t important. You can’t dispense with the scaffolding before you make the climb. In fact, you must build it.
This is one of the underlying components of my daily pages habit. So often I am squeezing them in when I am tired or otherwise not at my best, most focused writerly self. That’s okay. I am building scaffolding. I am clearing space. I am getting stronger, callousing my fingers for the journey ahead.
To switch metaphors, there is another practice about taking the worthwhile fragments and turning them into something else, pinning them together in an order, creating a flow. There is yet another practice about taking those pinned-together pieces and sewing the seams, taking something rough and making it into something finished. Not perfect, but ready for display, for function, ready to occupy its place in the world.
Here’s something else Liz Rosner said this weekend: Take it one little piece at a time. Don’t think about the whole book, the entire project. Just do the one piece that’s in front of you. Anne Lamott has a one-inch frame on her writing desk, Liz reminded us. This focuses her on just that smallest section of the work at hand.
What is your one-inch frame right now? It might be editing one page. Writing one sentence or a scene or a page. Brainstorming for fifteen timed minutes. What is the one little piece that is in front of you today?
Share your thoughts in the comments below. I look forward to hearing from you!
Last week I started to work with a hypnotist about my writing. She said all my life experiences were available in my subconscious and through the quiet relaxation, they’d come up.
Today I see my quiet relaxation as part of my writing scaffolding. Mentally creating the space for what I needs to be written about.
Onto those 750 words. Forward!
Bree, That is wonderful! A great part of scaffolding. Reminds me of something Annie Dillard tells us in The Writing Life, about a poet who hung a sign on his door while he slept that said, “Do not disturb. The poet is at work.”
This is one reason why I encourage all of us to write before we connect with the internet, email, social media–to allow that spaciousness, that quiet. Love it. Thanks so much for sharing.