Drafting part 1: Chaotic good

A few weeks ago, my client M met the madman.

M had been struggling with his first drafts—his free writing wasn’t free at all. There was nothing ‘wrong’ with the early drafts he was handing in, but he seemed to be reaching for a voice that wasn’t his own. Beyond that, he was struggling with the blank page. In conversation his ideas were big and clear and unspooled without end, yet he was stuck getting any of that down in writing. If something didn’t change in how he was approaching the void, he would have to tackle the near-impossible task of back-engineering his own voice.

That’s when I introduced M to the madman. The “madman” language isn’t my own, as I’ll get to below, and you can call it the Dasher, the Freewriter, or something else. The idea behind the madman is to release yourself to the blank page, and from self-judgment and concern about the final draft. To stop writing ‘first drafts’ and start writing free. I told M that the next time he sat down to write, he should try embodying a chaotic spirit who couldn’t care less about the end product.

My favorite movie.

A week later, M was writing like himself, as himself. Not only was his writing much more clear, his core values were shining through. He was producing more writing to work with, and he was having a lot more fun doing it.

M wanted to portray a confident philosopher in his writing, but in bypassing the madman stage he was undermining true confidence in his own voice and in the writing process. The madman may be crazy, but he is also full of a crazy faith—something will come of this.

Embracing chaos changed M’s enthusiasm for his work, his excitement, and his engagement with his own ideas. It revealed his writer’s voice and opened up his process from a state of constriction to one of expansion. While writing is supposed to ‘order’ our thinking, embracing chaos as a core part of creativity—as its origin—can liberate you into your art. Embracing chaos will help unblock you from getting started, so you can begin to write enough to hear your own voice, discover your interests, energies, patterns, and passions, and ultimately to create and share work you’re proud of, that comes from your one and only heart.

With M on my mind, I dug into my archives this week to share a piece I did for Every a couple of years ago about the role of chaos in creation (since revised).

On Friday, I’m sharing a special expanded prompt as a follow-up to this piece, starring Jack Kerouac’s “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.” If you’re not already subscribed, this is a free, twice-weekly newsletter. If you’ve been enjoying Practice, Process, Craft and learning something, please share with other writers in your life. I will never charge for this work.

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Now let’s raise hell.

“We take

unholy risks to prove

we are what we cannot be. For instance, 

I am not even crazy.”

Amiri Baraka, Snake Eyes, 1963 

Do you ever stop yourself before you start, afraid of not being able to get anywhere until you’ve already been?

Do you produce try-hard first drafts that sound like you ingested the archives of HBR and they ate your soul away from the inside?

Do you constantly ask yourself as you are writing, ‘Does this sound smart? Am I even smart at all? Does this make sense? Has anything ever made sense that I have ever thought in my life? Have I ever even had a thought?’

Do your hands shake above the keys, ash falling from the cigarette gripped between your teeth, body tensed like a psycho cat, one finger extended to pluck out the great chord of your infinite voice, poised to change the world but unable even to change your underwear, desperately asking anyone’s God, “Which letter would Nabokov choose next?”

For years, the students in Professor Betty Flowers’ writing classes kept identifying the same two biggest writing challenges: “getting started” and “not getting started.” To help them get unblocked and stay that way, Flowers developed four creative personas or roles her students could embody to guide them through the different stages of the writing process—madman, architect, carpenter, judge. She writes:

What happens when you get stuck is that two competing energies are locked horn to horn, pushing against each other. One is the energy of what I'll call your 'madman.' He is full of ideas, writes crazily and perhaps rather sloppily, gets carried away by enthusiasm or anger, and if really let loose, could turn out ten pages an hour. 

The second is a kind of critical energy—what I'll call the 'judge.' He's been educated and knows a sentence fragment when he sees one. He peers over your shoulder and says, 'That's trash!' with such authority that the madman loses his crazy confidence and shrivels up. You know the judge is right—after all, he speaks with the voice of your most imperious English teacher. But for all his sharpness of eye, he can't create anything.

Flowers gave a new name to an idea that’s been around a long time—whatever comes first has to be messy and chaotic and cannot be judged; constraining the chaotic first thoughts of any writing constricts all creative potential.

Beat writer Allen Ginsberg popularized the madman-esque phrase “first thought, best thought,” which came from a conversation with his “lama guru,” the Tibetan Buddhist Chogyan Trungpa Rinpoche. Other Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs shared Ginsberg’s belief that unfiltered writing is the only way to realize or express anything like “truth,” and shame spirals of self-editing ultimately obscure all authenticity and stifle vitality.

In the Buddhist review Tricycle, Dr. Jeremy Hayward characterized Rinpoche and the Beats’ idea of “first thought, best thought” thus: “That first moment of fresh perception, before the colorful and coloring clouds of judgment and personal interpretation take over. ‘First thought’ is ‘best thought’ because it has not yet got covered over by all our opinions and interpretations, our hopes and fears, our likes and dislikes. It is direct perception of the world as it is.” 

To lay down the world “as it is,” the Beats embraced a stream-of-consciousness style (Kerouac called it “self ultimacy”) where one thought follows another, sentences toppling over each other and buzzing and bouncing along like beans in a brain pan or a jalopy on an unpaved road.

Take this excerpt from On The Road, where Kerouac writes in his writing style about writing in his writing style: 

One night when Dean ate supper at my house—he already had the parking-lot job in New York—he leaned over my shoulder as I typed rapidly away and said, “Come on man, those girls won’t wait, make it fast.”

I said, “Hold on just a minute, I’ll be right with you soon as I finish this chapter,” and it was one of the best chapters in the book. Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls. As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and “how-to-write,” etc.), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn’t care and we got along fine—no pestering, no catering; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends. I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me. As far as my work was concerned he said, “Go ahead, everything you do is great.” He watched over my shoulder as I wrote stories, yelling, “Yes! That’s right! Wow! Man!” and “Phew!” and wiped his face with his handkerchief. “Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears…”

“That’s right, man, now you’re talking.” And a kind of holy lightning I saw flashing from his excitement and his visions, which he described so torrentially that people in buses looked around to see the “overexcited nut.”

A lot of people love Kerouac, but if you got nothing from that, you’re not alone. Capote famously said of Kerouac’s work: “It isn’t writing, it’s typing.” A more generous perspective might call it a first draft—while other writers edit the chaos out, Kerouac and the boys just left it in. But embracing the madman stage sure as shit helped them write like hell, so if you’re one of the countless writers who just can’t seem to get started, don’t try so hard to make a first draft of writing. Just make it typing.

The Beats and the Buddhists weren’t the only madmen. Romantic poet William Blake wrote, “First Thought is Best in Art, Second in Other Matters.” Blake did not write anything like the style of the Beats (he may simply have included rewriting and editing among the “other matters”) so don’t be afraid that if you type like Jack you’ll end up with a bunch of crazy pages and nothing to hold onto. Quoth William: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” 

“First thought, best thought” is about cleaning the doors of perception, to embrace nonjudgment, while the madman throws off his weighted clothes and smashes the doors of your cavern.

The Ancient of Days, William Blake

The idea of embracing chaos or accessing a chaotic state in order to create brings me back to another line of Romantic poetry I’ve had stuck in my head for more than a decade. (If you ever get the chance to go to Scotland to study the Romantics from a three-hundo-year-old stone building that overlooks a beach where the ruins of a monastery destroyed during the Reformation are frozen falling forever into the cold North Sea, would highly recommend 10/10.) 

Anyway, the line I’m thinking of comes from John Keats’  unfinished epic Hyperion, which describes the plight of the Titans, ruled by the god Saturn, who are being thrown out of power by the Olympians. The Titans were there first, almost since the beginning! Saturn is not taking this well. Bemoaning the end of his reign, Saturn asks:

“But cannot I create? 

Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth 

Another world, another universe, 

To overbear and crumble this to nought? 

Where is another Chaos? Where?”

The universe was created out of Chaos. Saturn wants to start over. He dreams of a return to Chaos so that he can begin to create again.

The best version of Hercules.

In Hesiod’s creation myth, Chaos was the first of the four primordial deities, followed by Earth, Tartarus (a kind of prison world), and Eros. Chaos begat Darkness and Night, and the two of them begat Light and Day, and later the Titans were born (I don’t know how this works, sorry! Not a doctor). 

Some scholars interpret Chaos as a place between Heaven and Earth, or between Earth and Tartarus. Others say Chaos is a void, and still others call Chaos the “first and only thing in the universe,” not just a gaping space but a thing, conceivable and real. The classicist Mitchell Miller called Chaos the “principle of division,” and Eros the “principle of unification”—rather than being precise opposites, they are a continuum, where one is made possible by the existence of the other. 

If it helps, you can think of the governing principle of your first draft (your scribbled chaotic pages, your free write) as the principle of division, and the governing principle of your remaining drafts (toward idea, thesis, evidence, point) as the principle of unification. 

In order to achieve unity you have to begin with chaos. 

When you first sit down to write, rather than coming with a plan, give your flying, spinning, spilling thoughts room on the page, so that they have a chance to meet and maybe join up to form an idea, like the particles after the Big Bang. Don’t play God here and pick and choose which thoughts might be worthy of adding to your chaos—if they occur to you, write them down, don’t pretend they aren’t happening. Don’t think about how they are coming out. Then take one thought and divide it again, question it from all angles, splitting it until you get to something you can’t split anymore. 

The way cells divide to eventually become a single person, this chaotic state can eventually lead to a unified idea. 

You can also backtrack from unification to division as a kind of creative prompt. It’s the premise of this newsletter and my philosophy that simple stories of cause-and-effect are never the whole truth. Look at anything that appears unified closely enough—most of our dearly held beliefs, ideas, concepts, and principles can’t hold true in all circumstances and conditions. The closer you look at something you think of as true, the quicker it dissolves back into chaos, just another Monet.

So dig into those moments where you think you’ve found a truth and complicate it, dividing each thought, again and again, until you can’t divide anymore. Now you have a new starting place. 

All of creation begins in chaos because chaos is energy. All life coalesces from chaos, and all life will dissolve into chaos again—it is the resting state of the universe. This doesn’t discount the utility of unity or second drafts or big ideas or concepts. Planets happen and we live there for a while. But creativity is not possible without chaos.

It’s certainly Saturn’s thought when he pleads, “Where is another Chaos? Where?” How can we begin again? Which is to say: How can we begin? 

Pleasantville is a story about how creativity is impossible without introducing a chaotic element and order is a prison.

Thanks for revisiting this post with me. See you Friday for our special expanded Kerouac-inspired prompt!

Let chaos reign :)