Transcript: Episode 11

Hey friends, and thanks for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

Before I get going on this month’s topic, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the collective space and energy that we find ourselves in at the moment that this episode is coming out. If you’re joining from the close or semi-distant future, maybe you’ll have some good news for the rest of us, but in the meantime, we’re in the midst of a particularly grim moment on the world stage. This podcast isn’t directly about current world events, so I’m not going to speak directly to them except to just say that I stand with the voices calling for both a lasting ceasefire and for hostages and detainees to be returned to their families.

But my real reason for bringing this topic up in this space is that… writers tend to be sensitive folk. There is a running theme through this podcast that’s essentially: How do we bring our sensitivity into our creative work in ways that unfold and expand our stories instead of shutting them down? And how do we integrate our creative sensitivity into a world that can be inhospitable in so many ways, not just to creativity and sensitivity and empathy, but to the basic and essential right to life?

I’m not going to be answering those questions directly and efficiently in this episode, or likely in any episode. I’m pretty sure direct and efficient answers to those questions don’t exist. But I just want to affirm that part of being a storyteller is the capacity to feel deeply – and that capacity is as valuable as it is, sometimes, challenging. So whatever is currently emerging from your own capacity to feel deeply – sorrow, rage, anxiety, weariness, impatience, or even numbness – it’s valid, and it’s valuable.

This month, I am not going to be talking about the structure of trauma stories or the suffering artist trope or how capitalism restricts creative culture, because I frankly do not have the capacity for any of that stuff right now. This month, when it comes to storytelling and writing practice, I’ve actually been thinking about two very simple things: attention and breath.

The idea of conscious attention is central to a lot of different discourses related to what you might describe as mental or psychological or spiritual “wellness” – mindfulness, meditation, nervous system regulation, various kinds of therapy. (The over-simplified idea of “wellness” as it appears in mainstream culture has started to get a fair amount of well-deserved flak lately, but it’s still a useful shorthand sometimes.)

A lot of these practices, both the overly simplified versions and the more nuanced practices behind them, involve some core element of changing the way we pay attention. If you’re studying a strict form of mediation that’s been passed down through an official lineage for hundreds of generations – one of the things you’re studying is how to pay attention to certain things in a certain specific, powerful way.

On the opposite end of the nuance and complexity scale, if you’re pausing to picture yourself beside a beautiful lake and take some gentle deep breaths because you just scrolled past a wellness meme in your Instagram feed – you’re also changing your attention.

Essentially, the idea is that we have some recurrent point of struggle or pain in our lives that we want to shift. And the way to shift it, to change what we’re experiencing in our daily lives, is to shift how we’re paying attention to our daily lives. And that shift in how we pay attention to being alive is both the method and the result – it nurtures and unlocks new experience without actually necessarily changing what we experience.

I’ve learned and practiced a few different forms of this kind of attention-shifting (which I was originally referring to as “intentional attention” while I was drafting this episode, but then I decided to google that phrase and I saw a lot of results about optimized corporate leadership on people’s LinkedIn blogs, so like… nah, I’m not gonna use that phrase in this context).

When it comes to shifting my attention in the context of writing, I’ve usually approached it from the angle of shifting my mindset before starting a writing session. So, doing what I can to get out of a critical or anxious headspace and into an exploratory and experimental one before I begin to write. This in and of itself can be a really beneficial and powerful practice.

But what I’ve been wondering lately is how to apply different ways of paying attention to the actual process of the writing, while I am actually doing it.

I’m not talking about “paying attention” in the kind of like punitive, elementary school sense of “Sit still! Be quiet! Pay attention!” I personally find this to be the flavor of a lot of more formalized methods of meditation, and also of a lot of writing advice about just showing up to write as an exercise of discipline and willpower. I mean, sitting still and being quiet is for sure one time-honored way of paying creative or spiritual attention, but it’s by no means the only one (and it’s not even the best one for all of us, all the time).

I’m thinking more about “paying attention” in the sense of being intentionally and somatically present within an experience, so in this case the experience of storytelling. And I’m using the phrase “somatically present” to convey a type of embodied connection or awareness that I think is often missing from the way writers tend to conceptualize their writing process.

“Somatics” is used to describe some types of therapeutic practices intended to change the way people process trauma in their bodies. These practices are becoming more commonly known lately as tools for mental and nervous system health beyond treating acute trauma. So if you’ve maybe encountered terms like “somatic experiencing,” “therapeutic tremor,” or EMDR, those are all types of somatic therapy.

I have a layman’s knowledge of some of these therapies, but I’m mostly using the word “somatic” here in its more general sense of the mind-body connection. It’s similar to mindfulness, but with a bit more emphasis on the body part of the equation. And specifically for our purposes, I’m thinking about how we might be able to tap into our somatic mind-body connection to cultivate and access deeper awareness of storytelling. Not awareness of our ideas and theories about storytelling. But actual awareness of our stories and the embodied, relational process of giving them form.

(I’m aware that this ironically sounds pretty theoretical when I explain it that way… but at the root, this is all just about different ways of paying attention, and playing with how our changing our attention changes how it feels to write.)

(That still sounds kind of like word salad, but it’s going to get more concrete. Hopefully.)

So, if I’m talking about changing how we pay attention to our writing, then what point are most writers starting from? I think the mainstream way we study and practice storytelling craft often encourages us to conflate paying attention with catching errors or imperfections.

We try to pay the best, most granular attention to the details of the words on the page, in order to bring them closer to some standard of excellence. And at certain points of the writing process, there’s not actually anything wrong with this kind of paying attention. Once you’re in the stage of revisions where you’ve settled on the shape and articulation of the story and are ready to polish wording – a very granular and even critical mode of paying attention can be useful for that.

But this style of paying attention tends to seep into the entire experience of writing, including parts of the drafting process where this style is actively opposed to the experience of storytelling. Instead of paying attention to the story itself, and to our relationship with it as the storyteller, we’re paying attention to the words as a sort of inert output. And we’re using our attention to judge and then fix that output. It can become sort of like trying to create a painting by critically evaluating the correctness or incorrectness of each brushstroke while it’s being placed – while it’s happening.

(I’m not a painter, but I would assume it’s either pretty near impossible to paint that way, or at the very least extremely stressful and unpleasant.)

One of the side effects of anxiety in its many forms is that it messes up your ability to pay attention in ways that aren’t critical or catastrophic or hypervigilant. You get so fixated on paying a certain type of automatic and often maladaptive attention that you lose the ability to pay attention intentionally. You lose the ability to be fully somatically present in your life.

I think our creative anxieties function in much the same way. They prevent us from being present with the story, in ways that can become increasingly frustrating and distressing as we attempt to work through a draft.

So, going back to what I said earlier about bringing mindfulness into our actual storytelling, into our drafting experience – how can we pay attention as we write in ways that take us deeper into presence and relationship with the story?

I’m going to dig into this through one specific type of paying attention, in the hopes of coming to some overarching principles that might be the basis for many types of attention-shifting. Not every type of mindful attention is going to work for every writer, but I think there’s probably a certain common type of experience that could be aimed for through different personalized means.

Paying attention to the breath is one of the cornerstones of many different mindfulness and somatic techniques across many different cultures – so I thought it would make an especially powerful example to explore. How can we use our breath to pay deep attention to the story (and to the storytelling process) as we’re writing it?

I’m going to reverse-engineer a bit here, and first consider a way to think about breath in storytelling that’s more concrete and maybe a bit more familiar.

One of the core ways readers experience a story on the page is through the pacing of individual scenes, and then the pacing of how those scenes connect into the overall form and fabric of the story. (And just as a quick throwback to last month’s episode on structure and form, pacing is one of the craft elements that Jane Allison looks at in order to categorize stories into different structural shapes.)

One way to get a stronger, clearer perspective on the pacing of a scene is to consider the way it breathes on the page. And I mean that literally here, not just metaphorically or metaphysically (although that’s part of it too). Reading scenes aloud is a common revision tip, and it’s very effective. It works partly because it encourages your brain to experience the words on the page in a really different way than most of us do while we’re writing. The physical act of speaking the words causes us to literally hear them in a different way.

But when we read a scene or a full story aloud, we’re also interacting with the story physically through our breath. Just as we literally hear the story, we also literally breathe with the story. Embodied language inherently breathes, and so language on the page breathes as well. And the way a scene breathes has a subtle but strong effect on the way a reader experiences the scene.

This is really what writers and editors are talking about when we say things like “this pacing feels a little too rushed, maybe it could be expanded a bit here” (or, alternately, “this scene is a real page-turner, great job”). Pacing feels off – either too fast or too slow – when the language on the page is breathing faster or slower than what makes sense with the content of the scene (or with the writer’s goals for the scene).

When we breathe with a story by reading it aloud, we become mindful of that breath in way we often aren’t while we’re writing. It becomes easier to really pay attention to what’s on the page. (Or maybe, it becomes harder to let our ideas about the story eclipse the reality of the story’s current form.)

Think about it from the perspective of revising character dialogue. Reading dialogue aloud is helpful because it provides an embodied gut-check on whether an actual human would actually say whatever dialogue you’ve put in the speaker’s mouth. (Or, if the story isn’t aiming for realism, it still gives you a gut-check on whether the dialogue feels and sounds true to the characters and the story.)

But in a way, all written language is dialogue – it’s a representation of language that breathes. This is why we describe writing as having a “voice,” even when there’s no dialogue. Reading out loud reminds us viscerally that dialogue isn’t the only language on the page that implies or contains breath.

Because I write and edit in English, I’m talking a lot about spoken language here, but I want to acknowledge that signed languages are also languages that breathe. Breath is just as much part of the form, the expression, and even the grammar of signed languages like ASL – and so breath is just as much part of the artistry of signed storytelling as it is in spoken storytelling. So I don’t think it’s going too far to say that breath and storytelling are fundamentally inseparable.

Even if a story is never spoken, it breathes, because human language breathes. And this matters for writers because the way breath moves through bodies has a lot to do with the way stories affect us on the most fundamental, biological level.

We can feel this instinctively in storytelling settings like live theater and music – after an experience when we got really drawn into a good, dramatic performance of a play, we might say things like “I was holding my breath all through that scene.” When the audience cheers or yells or sings during a live performance, we’re physically expressing our connection with that performance through our breath. And that engaged connection then becomes even deeper through the act of expressing it.

Basically, there’s a reason musicians are always asking “how’s everybody doing tonight?” or just telling us to “make some noise,” and there’s a reason we generally like to do so (at least if we’re the kind of person who likes to go to live music performances). The way we breathe brings our bodies into the emotional state and narrative of the performance. Breath makes us part of it.

It’s the kind of thing that is so fundamental that it actually sounds a bit silly when it’s stated directly. But it’s just as much true of the reading process as it is of a pop concert. There’s even an increasing amount of literary theory that brings in scientific frameworks like embodied cognition to analyze the way readers actually experience a story spatially and physically, not just as a disembodied reading mind.

The examples of scene pacing and dialogue are just two ways a reader might become physically engaged or somatically synced with a story, through the way their mind-body relates to the actual words on the page. And the breath is a key way bodies relate to stories – so it’s a key way readers can come into the kind of deep connection with a story that leaves them changed in new ways each time they read it.

Okay, so, hopefully you’re on board with me about using breath as a tool for experiencing the story while we’re revising the wording. But, I started this whole discussion by saying that the way we pay attention while we’re actually drafting should probably not be focused on making detailed decisions and judgements about the wording. Because, at least speaking for myself, that’s where things tend to start going into a criticism spiral, or even into an panic response.

So the next question is: How can breath be a tool or a portal for paying mindful attention while we’re actually trying to get words on the page? Not just before our writing session, to get us settled and focused in on a creative headspace. And not just after we’ve gotten the words down.

Exercises that use mindful breath are often focused on grounding (and here I’m using the term “grounding” in the common sense of calming the nervous system by bringing awareness back to the body). But writing very often feels like a fundamentally ungrounded activity – even when we’re writing nonfiction, we’re still conjuring up scenes and realities that aren’t tangibly happening in front of us. So paying attention to our breath in the typical way may keep us feeling more calm and grounded, but it’s also likely to pull us away from the story or from our sense of flow.

Creative flow states often leave us pretty unaware of our bodies, to the extent that we may not notice that our hand is starting to cramp, or that we haven’t drunk any water in hours, or that we’re slouched into the posture of a deceased pill bug with one shoulder hiked up to our ear. We release the sense of being grounded in our bodies and surroundings and become sort of untethered brain beings floating in some other, unidentified and unacknowledged space.

I’m starting to think that there may be a lot of power in just acknowledging the space we’d like to be in as we write and enter flow – which is to say, acknowledging the space of the story.

What if right before we begin to write, after we’ve got our physical writing space and our bodies settled and ready to go – what if we were to somatically ground into the space of the scene or passage we’re about to draft? What if we took the time, each time we draft, to pay deep attention to the story space before we start putting words on the page?

This is probably easiest to imagine doing if you’re working on either fiction, memoir, or scene-based poetry. So, stories with a proper setting, and characters moving around in that setting. Grounding into the story space will be a bit weirder for projects that don’t have a setting (like, just for example, writing this podcast). I’ll come back to that a minute.

But looking at a story with a fairly concrete setting, grounding into that setting could be as simple as taking a couple minutes to really pull up that setting around ourselves before we write. I don’t think this needs to be complicated – the trick is in allowing ourselves to really go there, not in making the method overly complex or clever.

Breath can be an especially simple and powerful entry point into the world of the story because it’s a path we can access from our physical body – a path first into the setting, and then on into the breathing language we’re about to put on the page. When you conjure up the world of the scene, what’s the air like? How are the characters breathing within that setting? How clearly or deeply can you feel into that breath, and what do you start to feel or notice once you do? What becomes the first sentence you want to write?

I think this sort of “story breath” can also be an effective way to stay grounded in a scene if we start to feel stuck or lost or frustrated. In most story scenes, there’s going to be someone breathing. Someone whose breath we can pay attention to as a kind of tether, to keep us from drifting away into that undefined, trackless writer brain wilderness – where there may be critical, judgy thoughts waiting to waylay us like “well, what now?” or “jesus, that clause is really stupid” or just “why am I even doing this, again?”

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that using characters’ breath to stay grounded in the story space may result in the scene having more descriptions of literal breath than what would be strictly ideal. But like, it’s a draft! Part of my whole point here is that it’s okay if your early drafts have too many descriptions of people breathing, as long as you’re connecting deeply with the story – as long as you’re paying a kind of attention that keeps you in the mode of storytelling, not critiquing.

And staying in the mode of storytelling is just as important to stories that don’t have a firm setting, the kind of writing project where it’s even harder to be grounded in what feels like a tangible story space. One of the reasons I find breath to be so powerful as a grounding element is that it’s always available in storytelling, even when a setting isn’t. Because all language does have a certain quality and feel and color of breath.

Using this podcast as an example, I can’t really ground into a scene when I’m writing and recording this space each month. But I find that it is still a space, and it’s still a space that is fundamentally an exchange of breath. I’m not moving with characters through a scene as I write this, or as I speak it. And yet, here we are, sharing breathing language – language that I embody through the telling and you embody through the listening.

I already talked about how somatic aspects like the breath might effect a reader (or a listener) who’s having a deeply engaged experience with a story. And I think a somatic connection with our own writing has some similarly transformative things to offer us as well (beyond maybe making our writing sessions deeper or more enjoyable).

There’s something inherently isolating about writing, just as there’s something fundamentally ungrounded about it. It’s generally a solo activity, and in terms of the physical and emotional experience of writing, it’s drastically removed from the most fundamental form of human storytelling. For most of human history, we didn’t sit around reading stories silently to ourselves. So storytellers didn’t sit around by themselves typing or scribbling, alone even in the middle of a coffee shop or a library.

Just as human language inherently breathes, human language is inherently collective – it’s for communicating things to a community. That’s why it exists, and that’s really why stories exist. The narrative ancestors of our written stories are tales told around the fire. Tales to keep the cold away, tales to help bury the dead, tales to make the work days pass quickly and the festival nights last until sunrise. Tales for communities of bodies.

Storytelling isn’t really meant to feel disembodied or isolated or even individual. Our storyteller ancestors knew that stories were about relationships, about the collective imagining of communities of bodies. And that’s still really what all stories are about – even when they’re written down in a book and shared between two people who may never breathe into the same physical space.

When you breathe with a story as you’re writing it, when you pay deep attention to all the ways your stories are embodied imaginings – that’s when you actually become a storyteller. That’s when the story moves you, body and mind, in a way that allows the story to have its own life and to move others in turn. Breath puts the fire back at the center of the circle and places each of us around it, ready to listen, to be present, and to be changed.

And if nothing else, if breathing with a story just helps keep you from ending up spiraling for forty minutes in full-on dead pill bug posture, that in and of itself is a probably a great place to start.

Back near the start of the episode, I mentioned that breath is just one possible path into paying deep attention and creating a more somatic writing practice. This month’s writing praxis tip for newsletter members is all about that. It’s a brief exercise to help you figure out what embodied senses (in addition to breath) would be the best place for you personally to start playing with a more somatic approach to writing. It’s basically an easy, hands-on way to get data points on which senses pack the most proverbial punch for you in terms of helping become somatically immersed in a story you’re discovering.

If you’d like to get access to that exercise, scroll down in the show notes on your phone or on the episode webpage to join the newsletter circle. (And remember that if Substack is your jam, you can now get Substack access in the mobile show notes.)

Just one last note before I sign off for this month. I didn’t directly reference any source materials in this episode, but I did want to say that my percolating ideas about breath and storytelling have been more generally influenced by a lot of sources and cultural threads. Specifically, I wanted to mention David Abram’s classic book The Spell of the Sensuous, Joshua Schrei’s work on the Emerald podcast, and my trancework teacher, Ren Zatopek. Check out the show notes for links to their work (and possibly a couple others, if I happen to think of somebody else I should include before this episode actually drops).

Thank you for sharing the air in this virtual space with me. And as always, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.