Re-Wilding the Writer

Dear Writers, carriers of story, crafters of words, metaphorical creatures, wild ones,

More and more, I think Wild Words is about encouraging writers (including myself) to stop thinking of ourselves as ‘writers.’ It’s about supporting all of us word-crafters to throw out the old words, and speak from a place of freshness.

Bear with me…

There’s a way of using words that is free from constraint, and censorship, but it requires us to put down a lot of concepts. I write about some of them in Radical Resolutions for Writers.

The idea ‘I’m a writer’, comes with a lot of baggage, expectations, hopes and fears. They can give us purpose and direction, but they also set up a situation of risk. There’s a lot at stake if our identity and self-worth are dependent on our book selling millions, or being interviewed by Graham Norton.

It’s hard to be playful and exploratory with words, when we feel we’re walking the high wire, have a gun at our head, or something similarly scary (fill in your own metaphor).

The key, I think, is to recognise that we have those anxieties and goals, those flitting little (or not so little) labels in our heads, but then to relax and wholeheartedly engage with the moment to moment physical process of writing.

The line ‘I WILL FIND A PUBLISHER’ can be scaled down, and held lower-case, small size lightly.

We often feel that we have to make a real effort in order to write a ‘good’ story, but actually, that’s not true. If we touch on that intention intermittently, but keep our primary focus on the process, on this experience of pen to page, or fingers to keys, we find that we arrive at the goal with much less effort than we thought.

When we write in that way, what we’re really doing is trusting the natural storyteller to do the job for us. It’s more about the process than the outcome, but ironically, that results in more skilful writing, and a better outcome.

We then feel how we want to feel as writers, like adventurers, discovering new lands. Cue one of my favourite quotes:

The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depths of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.

– The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (Knopf, 1927)

It’s a journey to ‘re-wilding’ our words. That, in my opinion, is much the same process as environmental, external world, re-wilding. Journalist and activist George Monbiot (Feral Pages 9 and 10) describes it thus:

Rewilding, to me, is about resisting the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own way… The ecosystems that result are best describes not as wilderness, but as self-willed: governed not by human management but by their own processes.

Note, it’s not just a ‘chaos’, a ‘letting it all out’ and see what happens. There are forces at work, processes that guide. It’s about trusting those processes. We have a magnificent method for organically orienting towards health. That method, is storytelling.

To see the Writing Prompt that accompanies this article, you'll need to sign up on the Wild Words website homepage to receive the Monthly Newsletter, or join the Wild Words Facebook Group.

Would you like 1-1 guidance to put these ideas into practice? Consider the Mentoring Scheme. It starts again this month, and there’s a place or two left!

Photograph courtesy of Peter Reid.