Defeating the King of Hearts

On Tuesday mornings I volunteer down at Backstreet Community Arts as a writers group coach. Over the past month or so I’ve been getting a lot of first-timers who, when I ask them what they want to write about, say, “I don’t know.”

When pressed, though, the majority of them say they’d like to write about their lives and what they’ve dealt with and how they’ve become who they are. And they don’t know where to begin.

As I do my spiel about Lichtenbergianism and the Nine Precepts, they are hesitant to trust what I’m saying. I don’t blame them — writing is scary.

Mostly they’re afraid to put anything on paper because they don’t know where to begin, and that’s when we have to dismantle the King of Hearts Fallacy: “Begin at the beginning, go until you reach the end, then stop.”

Begin anywhere, I tell them. They wrinkle their brow.

No, really, I tell them. I explain how I filled four or five WASTE BOOKS with random thoughts about the Precepts, then organized them later, expanding thoughts into chapters as I went back and forth from TASK AVOIDANCE to ABANDONMENT.

This week I opened my William Blake’s Inn production WASTE BOOK (about which I have written before) and showed them how I write down random ideas for the seventeen musical numbers, using the title of a piece as the header for the page.

It’s a little hard to see here, but the left-hand page is a note about the “Epilog,” while the right-hand page is an idea about “The Wise Cow Makes Way, Room, and Believe,” which of course is not the order they come in in the show.

Sometimes the notes are general; sometimes I get down in the weeds and start choreographing movement and props and stuff:

And even then, I’m not necessarily doing it in order:

It’s like watching a fly buzz randomly around a room:

It’s all over the place. AND THAT’S OKAY, I tell the writers at Backstreet. Plop all that stuff in your head out onto a page, any page. Organize it later. When the time comes I’ll turn to the index of my WASTE BOOK and be able to go find every note for every number and assemble them into something resembling a script.

It’s been amazing to watch people who not one hour before had no grip on what they were going to do, start writing and then realize, as one writer put it, “You start writing one thing and then suddenly all these other things show up too!”

Yep. Plop it all down any which way — ABORTIVE ATTEMPT.

Organize it later — GESTALT/SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.

Defeat the King of Hearts.