What Do I Mean By "Yoga for writers"?

And no, it's not about putting your writerly ankle behind your readerly ear

Writers’ words are the equivalent of actors’ bodies: they embody what we want to express, and they are the medium through which our audience will experience that expression. Actors don’t only learn fencing in case they’re cast in a sword-fight, they also do it because it’s fantastic training for balance, footwork, strength and lightning-quick reactions - just as learning to sing is for the voice, even when you’ve no intention of auditioning for a musical.

And both actors and musicians study Alexander Technique because its focus is on the body being relaxed-but-ready: whatever the actor’s imagination has created needs to emerge through their voice and movement, unhampered by physical tensions and restrictions. For writers, the equivalent is the cognitive systems which imagine the events, themes, characters, settings and ideas of your story, and then retrieve and arrange the best words to embody and communicate it all.

So when I’m referring to ‘yoga* for writers’, as I very often am, what do I mean? Our yoga is about ensuring that our word-mind can respond as fully and fluently as possible to whatever our story-mind comes up with. That goes not just for first-drafting, but for all the re-visiting of editing and revising as well: how it ends up is what matters, not necessarily getting it right first time. Or you could say:

• What matters isn’t necessarily getting it right first time, but how it ends up.

• Getting it right first time isn’t necessary: what matters is that it ends up right.

• What matters is how it ends up, not necessarily getting it right first time.

• It isn’t necessary to get it right first time: what matters is that it’s right in the end.

and so on. And that’s without changing the meaning very much at all - although we could discuss the two different ways necessary/ily shows up in those. For a more extended example of this kind of thing, click through to the 60+ versions of the same sentence on my post A Million Little Versions.

Here are some more yoga-things for writers:

1. Pick a longish sentence of your own, and see how many versions you can come up with - I’d suggest starting by sticking closely to the meaning you began with, in formally correct grammar, and then loosening your corsets, kicking off your shoes, and seeing what else you can come up with. Which do you like, and which might suit what kind of voice?

   1. To think about why and how the order of a sentence makes a difference, and what to do about it, try this post.

   2. When you particularly notice another writer’s sentence, either because it’s super-effective or because it’s super-clunky, take a moment to mentally rearrange the elements, change the words or the metaphors, and see what difference it makes.

2. When you’re waiting for a bus or a friend, get out your notebook, pick one of your senses - sound, scent, touch or taste - and list everything that sense is picking up. If you want to work with sight, concentrate on the abstract elements of what you can see - light, colours, lines and shapes - not the denotation that’s always what first occurs to us.

3. Choose a category of thing which you know reasonably well - animals, feelings, university subjects, rivers, food - and try to come up with one for each letter of the alphabet.

4. Think of a verb - say, call - which often crops up as a phrasal verb, and see how many different meanings it acquires depending on the particle which it’s paired with: call on, call off, call in, call out, call up, call down upon, call away, call over…

5. Freewriting. Possibly the most basic - as in, foundational as well as simple - yoga of all.

6. Clustering - write a word in the middle of a blank page, and start a free-association spider, including sound and image as well as meaning and ideas: to stay in a freewheeling, freewriting mindset, write quickly and don’t let your left-brain over-think or censor. When a chain of associations peters out, go back to the centre and start another, and another, till the page is full.

   

7. Think of a rhyme-sound - say, hat - and see how many words you can come up with: not just at, bat, cat, but chat, dat (as in that), gnat, matte, sat, spat and sprat… and then more syllables: hearat, polecat, caveat, magnificat, secretariat… And what about slant rhymes?: attic, batty, chapatti, melodramatic.

   1. This is a great piece about playing with rhyme in far more ways, including W N Herbert’s brilliantly useful Rhymewell, which makes a good yoga exercise in itself. And this is from Herbert’s own chapter in what I and my Open University muckers called the Big Red Book:

      

   2. Full disclosure: I got out my Rhyming Dictionary to draft this bullet point. What’s good enough for Stephen Sondheim is shame-free for the rest of us.

8. If you meet a word whose meaning you don’t know - or one you’ve only ever had a rough idea about - don’t just look it up in full, play with it. Start a rhymewell with it, or a cluster. Put it into sentences or, even better, poems, so you get a feel for the sound and rhythm of it. Look it up in a thesaurus and compare it with its nearly-synonyms.

9. Take a poetry course. Poets are the yogis of word-wrangling, and you don’t have to want to take up residence in their ashrams to benefit from a bit of what they’re on. Ideally, you are looking for a course which talks about nuts and bolts: rhythm, form, rhyme and so one. Your local FE college or The Poetry School are good place to start (the latter’s free Lucky Dip Lessons are excellent little kick-starters) and there are lots of books to help.

10. See how many different metaphors you can come up with to evoke a character in a situation. Go with silly ones too: no one ever became bendier by worrying if they’ll look foolish trying to get their ankle behind their ear. For example, each of these is doing a different figurative thing:

    1. As Sarah raced towards the bus stop the huddle of tourists broke up and scattered.

    2. Pedestrians come in waves, and she’s dodging and skipping through them.

    3. She was pounding towards safety - past an old face like a fish – a boy thin as a stork - oranges and apples are jewels on a fruit-stall - then up surged a big, square splat of red which was the bus.

    4. She leaps between the closing doors’ rubbery lips and into the bus’s warm, grubby breath.

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* Of course, anyone who spends a lot of their time sitting at a desk working on a keyboard would be wise to spend a little of their time mitigating the physical effects: the tight, stretched or weak muscles that limit your range of movement and the stiffened joints that result; the reduced circulation; the lack of stress on your bones; the low demand on your cardio-vascular system. Yoga, pilates, dancing, walking, running, swimming, weight-bearing or resistance exercise… they all help.

Credits:

Cluster © Emma Darwin 2024

Rhymewell: W N Herbert, ‘Rhyme’, in Linda Anderson (ed.), Creative Writing, a workbook with readings, Open University/Routledge, 2006, p.225

Image: Mohammad Hassan on Pixabay