Would you like to play with me? I’m between creative projects, trying to let my mind rest and replenish. Are you in this place too? Want to try a brain relaxer?
To start, let’s get back in our pajamas. Pour a cup of tea. Put on some music. Pull out a sheet of paper or two. And a pen that feels good in our hands. Don’t worry, I will not ask you to draft something. This exercise will be so much easier.
The truth is, I’ve been feeling lost since finishing a monster edit of my novel—an edit that nearly broke my brain. I have set the document on the kitchen counter like it’s a piece of dough. I’m letting it breathe. But I keep nervously checking under the tea towel to see if it’s rising. I keep fiddling with it. Last week, I wrote an entirely new first page and adjusted the rest of the first chapter to keep pace. The revision felt good and helped the dough rise, but then I came back to the same ___________.
I’m not sure what to put in that blank. Are you? I have the urge to fill all blanks with verbs, with doing, with producing. And yet…
When I opened a file with a draft story about the devil, all I could do was cut a hundred words, change “devil” to “satan,” and close the file again. So I wrote the first page of my next novel instead. It looked suspiciously like the terrible first page of my next novel that I already wrote a year ago. Then I drafted a poem about cantaloupe in my phone notes. You can guess how that went.
My brain is just not ready because, while I am (kind of) letting my novel rest, I have not let my brain rest. I don’t know how to rest my brain. Do you? What does rest look like and why do I feel so terrible doing it?
Anyway, back to the pajamas. Let’s put those on, then pull up Richard Serra’s verb list. You know the one everyone was talking about right after he died? It’s a list of art verbs. Things you do when you make art.
All we are going to do is copy it. We can do that, right? To copy. (A verb not on his list, by the way). Instead of actually doing any of Serra’s verbs, we are merely going to let them pass through our eyes into our brain and out our hand onto paper.
The paper doesn’t have to be pretty. The back of a grocery list will do. Your handwriting can be for shit. We can do this. We can rewrite Serra’s iconic list. I am not sure what rewriting the list will “do.” Maybe nothing. But, whatever, let’s do it together. It will be fun! When you are done, please share a picture of your list. I want to see your hand on the page, how the words look when you spell them out. Tell me how the experience was for you. If it feels like tilling the soil of your brain, readying your subconscious for future growth, by all means let me know!
Some words already leap off the page at me before I even start copying. It’s interesting to think how they might apply to writing instead of visual art-making. Hinge, weave, scatter, knot. How do you a knot a poem? I’d like to knot my next sonnet. But not today.
I notice to rest, to breathe, to rise are not on Serra’s list. This seems important. I will add these verbs to my list. Maybe there are verbs you want to add? Maybe you will circle verbs that speak to you. Maybe you will cross some out. Will you pause over the words that don’t start with “to”—that are more conceptual like “of gravity”? Change in pattern is always the most interesting moment in any work. We naturally wonder why the switch? Perhaps Serra was acknowledging that we don’t always have to verb, can’t always verb, that not verbing is important too … I don’t know. Let’s find out.
