Lynda Barry on writing without thinking
“Is this good? Does this suck?”
Last week, in an interview with the London Writers' Salon, I was asked a question that I don’t think I’ve ever been asked before:
If a writer has sixty minutes a day, how would you design that block based on your research?
In reply, I tried to say that one ought to be strict about finding that daily hour and protecting it from distractions and interruptions—but that the writing time itself should not have a quality of strictness. Instead, it should feel more like a gift to yourself: an hour in which to tinker, explore, follow things wherever they lead.
I think this is a decent enough answer—and yet, afterward, I felt like I had failed to give up the goods in some crucial way. Surely there’s more to it than that?
As I was mulling this over, I happened to pluck Lynda Barry’s 2008 book What It Is from my bookshelf. This hybrid graphic memoir/creative workbook was recommended to me years ago by B.A. Lampman of the wonderful newsletter Feed the Monster, but I had never gotten around to actually opening it. When I finally took a look—wouldn’t you know it, the book contains specific, detailed, and totally brilliant instructions for how to design a block of writing time.
Side note: I try not to get too woo-woo in this newsletter, but . . . this keeps happening to me? I will have a question or a dilemma in mind, and then the very next book I pick up will have exactly the answer I need. It’s eerie and wonderful.
My experience reading What It Is was sort of eerie, too. The graphic memoir portion is straightforward enough: It recounts Barry’s difficult childhood growing up with a sour, bullying mother; her discovery of drawing as a way of coping and processing what was happening in her life; and, as she got older, her development of crippling insecurity around her creative work. (More on that shortly.)
The workbook portion, on the other hand—I’m not sure how Barry did it, and it sounds a little cheesy to say, but turning these pages I felt like I was being lowered into a deeper layer of consciousness and then brought back up, like a teabag dunked in warm water.
I did not expect this! Normally, I find creative workbook–type exercises a little too paint-by-numbers to be impactful in any lasting way. But Barry’s exercises are deep, the result of her own hard-won insights into the creative process.
As I mentioned above, Barry had to overcome crippling insecurity to make a life as a writer and artist. (Now 69, she published the underground comic Ernie Pook’s Comeek for almost thirty years, has authored numerous graphic novels, and was awarded a 2019 MacArthur “genius” grant, to name just a few of her accomplishments.) In What It Is, Barry explains her insecurity as the result of two questions—“Is this good?” and “Does this suck?”—that at a certain point became “the only two questions I had about my work,” draining all pleasure out of the drawing and storytelling that Barry had pursued effortlessly as a child.
The goal of the workbook pages is to help readers escape this trap. And Barry’s great insight, for me, is that the thing you’re after in writing is not thinking. As she puts it at one point, “Thinking up stories is hard. Getting them to come to you is easier.”
OK, so how does one design a block of writing time that does not involve thinking? Below are the key components of Barry’s method:
Relax the body: The first thing to do is a body scan from the top of your head down to the soles of your feet, relaxing each part as you go.
Focus on an image: Barry goes into a lot more detail about how to do this, but the basic idea is to choose a word, see what image this word brings to mind, and then start asking yourself questions about the image: who, what, when, where, how—finding your way into the image and then writing about it in the first person, starting with the words “I am” and continuing in the present tense.
Keep your pen moving: For this method to work, writing by hand is essential. “We are practicing a physical activity with a state of mind,” Barry keeps reminding us. She recommends using a three-ring binder filled with 200 sheets of loose-leaf notebook paper (because it doesn’t feel too precious) and whatever pen you like.
Use two notebooks: When you get to the point where you’re not sure what to write next—which is inevitable—Barry says you should not read over what you’ve written so far and not sit there puzzling over what to do. (Remember, the goal is not thinking!) Instead, move your hand to a second notebook—a “scribble notebook”—where you can draw a spiral, write out the letters of alphabet, or do anything else to keep your pen moving until you know what to write next.
Set two timers: This part was especially interesting to me. Barry recommends setting two timers for each block of writing time, and having one timer go off early so you can “feel” the time you have allotted to yourself. (If you have an hour available, for example, you should set one timer for an hour and the other timer for 50 minutes.)
By following these steps, Barry says, we can achieve “that strange floating feeling of being there and not being there,” which is where the best creative work happens, and where the dreaded Two Questions are kept at bay.
There’s a lot more about all of this in the book, which I highly recommend! Or you can watch Barry walk viewers through a version of this exercise in the following video:
Now, these techniques aren’t going to help much if you have an essay due tomorrow, or some other well-defined project that you just need to power through. But if you’re in the ideation or problem-solving phase of a creative project—or if you’re trying to un-stick a stuck practice—Barry’s exercises are a way to find material that has a richness and resonance that you can’t think your way into. For this reason, the exercises should be useful for anyone, not just writers. Barry’s goal is, she says, “to help us find images and follow them as they take form. Though we use writing here, once you feel what an image is, the form is up to you.”
So much of what she advises resonates with other things I’ve been thinking about in this newsletter: how the poet Mary Ruefle practices “fake handwriting” that somehow taps into the same “mystery” as real writing; how the composer Terry Riley says that “If you know what you’re doing in the arts, then you’re doing it wrong” (ha); how the filmmaker Céline Sciamma makes “wanted” and “needed” lists that she then tries to merge together; and how the novelist Solvej Balle says that writing fiction feels to her more like a listening process. Barry says the same thing! Here’s page 157 of What It Is:
I have also had this experience of listening rather than formulating—of hearing and recording a sentence “spoken from one part of me to another”—and as I’m starting to think about what’s next in my writing, I want to figure out a way to make this the dominant experience rather than an occasional one. I’m eager to try Barry’s method and see what comes to the surface—and, as always, I’m eager to hear from all of you about your own efforts to write without thinking, listen without formulating, and keep rolling forward along in time without judgment or expectation.
A BENIGN, GENEROUS SPACE
Quick reminder that if you’re looking for another way to silence the inner critic, my weekday Worm Zoom sessions are a great way to create (in the kind words of one longtime participant) a “benign, generous space” for letting things happen without that negative voice. We meet every weekday morning for two hours—find all the details and join us here.
BARRY V. MILCH
Lynda Barry’s techniques bear some similarity to a writing assignment that the Deadwood creator David Milch likes to give to his students, which he described in his memoir:
For the next five days, find a time each day, preferably the same time, and sit down and write not less than twenty minutes and not more than fifty minutes. Five-zero. Don’t think about it, don’t set it up on the computer, don’t think about what you’re going to write before you do it. No exceptions. This means you. Two voices, one and two. No names. No description. No description. That means no description. Voice one and voice two. The setting—don’t say what the setting is. No description. Write for not less than twenty minutes with those two voices. Just follow, just hear what they say. Not more than fifty minutes. Put it in an envelope, seal the envelope, and shut up. Don’t talk about it. Don’t think about what it means. Don’t think about who they are.
The next day, preferably at the same time, sit down and do it again. They may be the same voices, they may be different voices, don’t worry about it. Whatever comes out is fine. Don’t think about it. Just do it.
He adds:
In the course of these exercises, the true categories of your imagination emerge, and they are absolutely different from what you think they are. What the exercises do is build certain neural pathways and shut down certain other neural pathways. It’s a physiological and a behavioral sequence that creates neurological changes. It is a way of habituating yourself in a different fashion, and you can’t fool around with it.
For more Milch, see my piece on him from last year:
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Oh my God Mason, thank you so much. Not just for mentioning me in your illustrious newsletter, but for everything you've written here today. I LOVE that you got the book but you hadn't looked at it yet---a classic move that has happened to me many a time. The perfect moment arrived for you to discover the genius of Lynda Barry! I have many post-it notes in my copy of What It Is, and I go back to it time and time again because I need to be reminded to stop persisting with—you guessed it—thinking! As she says herself in the book, she kept learning and forgetting and then relearning that lesson for 30 years.
I pulled out What It Is again recently because I started giving workshops (collage and journaling), and I wanted to add a drawing workshop and incorporate some of Barry's methods. I called the workshop "Drawing Aliveness" in honour of her concepts and I scheduled the workshops to begin, but then pulled the plug because I became overwhelmed with everything I wanted to do and realized that my jumble of ideas was a big hot mess. It'll happen... I just need to have a better handle on how I want to approach it. Anyhoo, I DIGRESS.
Barry is completely unique in her approach, as far as I've seen. I've certainly read lots of similar types of things, but if you read What It Is and give yourself over to it, you'll have an experience like no other. As you worded it, you felt like you were being "lowered into a deeper layer of consciousness and then brought back up, like a teabag dunked in warm water". She is somehow able to take us there.
Thanks again Mason! ❤️
This honestly feels like a woo-woo moment for me too, because I’m just at a phase in my work (as a children’s book illustrator) when my inner critic is very loud. I’m also right in the middle-end part of painting a book. So not the best timing, but also probably very typical! I really resonated with the part where Lynda Barry talks about moving from enjoying making work to dreading it! I have Lynda’s books on my shelf, so I will pick up What It Is today before I begin work. Thank you!!
And another thought… I did an MA in Children’s Book Illustration recently (well, 2019 - part time for 2.5 years) and wrote my dissertation on finding the process behind my work, which I do by intuition. And I wanted to know how I actually make it, the process behind the process, if you will; and one thing that I found really helpful was learning about tacit knowledge, I’ll use Google here to explain: “Tacit knowledge is personal, hands-on knowledge that is difficult to articulate or transfer through writing or verbalization, contrasting with explicit knowledge. It is based on experience, intuition, and insight, and is typically learned through practice and observation”. I took it to mean that all the work we do, researching, practicing, getting lost down worm holes, agonising quite frankly, sometimes! All goes in somewhere, even if it feels like it’s in a jumble, and then if you allow yourself the time to work without thinking, as you say, that tacit knowledge begins to emerge. (With a fair wind blowing, haha!)
I call my Substack Gather•Filter•Make because that’s the process I figured out works for me. In actual fact, the true equation is Gather (chaos)>filter>make. I begin a project with obsessive gathering, which can include research, sketching, photos etc, which eventually gets so intense I get lost in it all (chaos), which is when I need to stop, and allow all the tacit knowledge to have space to emerge. All the useful nuggets I have gathered. For me this might be the equivalent of Lynda’s spirals on the page, more likely tidying the studio, painting something completely different just for fun, talking about what ever my creative struggle is with a friend etc… and then, if I’m lucky, I will head into the Make phase!!
Anyway, I enjoy your writing precisely for how fascinated you are in the creative process, so I’m hoping you’ll find this long (overindulgent?) comment interesting!!