The Curious Creative: Week 37

To Write Without Thinking: Exploring Body Language

This is the thirty-seventh installment of The Curious Creative, weekly 10-minute writing exercises for busy individuals interested in exploring their creativity. For the complete rationale, click here. 

My Thoughts:

For writers, sometimes we need to find our words in non-linguistic ways. Sounds strange, right? Admittedly, when I am most in the flow while writing, I am often not thinking. I leave that place of words, that linguistic center of my brain, and enter a different space. Similarly, while dancing tango, when I am at my best, which means most connected to my partner and the music, I am not thinking. If words do enter my mind, I immediately fall out of this connection and often make a mistake. As a result, while dancing, I work hardest to not think. The challenge is that unlike dance, where movement and breath are the building blocks, with writing, words are the building blocks, so how can we not think with words while creating words?

I recently took a creative writing class called “Body Language” (see source below), in which we used the language of movement to inform our creative writing and vice versa. I was most interested in transferring the zen space I enter in tango to my creative writing practice. I was able to achieve this for a few moments through an exercise the teachers had us do. We were to watch a qi gong movement, and without knowing its name in Chinese, ascribe it a name. Both performing the motions myself, and watching our teacher and classmates do so, put me in that zen state in which I could muster up a name without thinking too cerebrally. I used as little language-based thought as possible to conjure up a title, operating from a place of “blink decision making” or intuition.

For this week’s Curious Creative exercise, you will experience the exercise for yourself to hopefully put you in that same non-thinking mode of creativity. My hope is that with this mere 10 minutes of creative play, you will form muscle memory to help engage you in this non-thinking mode while writing in the future.

Your Turn!

1. Watch this youtube video.  You will see a man do two different qi gong movements. The subtitles are in German, so unless you know German, you will not be affected by learning the titles of the movements. The first one starts at 0:50. The second one starts at 2:36. He repeats both a couple of times. 

2. Without thinking too much, write a title for each of the movements. Just to give you an idea, some qi gong exercise names are “Immortal Looks to the Heavens,” “Dragon Holds Pearl,” and “Bamboo Bends in the Wind.” You don’t need to think of similar names; just know that you can create metaphorical ones, not just literal descriptions of the movements. 

How did you do? Did a title pop into your mind immediately, without apparent word-thought? Were you able skip any belaboring over word choice? Did you feel a kind of pressure-free relaxation as you watched the movement?

To encourage each other and grow a community of Curious Creatives, sign in from a google account so you can share your creation in the comment box below. Also, if you subscribe to this blog (submit your email address in the "Follow this Site by Email" box to the right), you will get an email update whenever a new exercise is added. Thanks for playing! 

Source: inspired by the workshop, “Body Language: Exploring Your Secondary Intelligence,” taught at The Hugo House by Jill Leininger and Ilvs Strass on 8/13/17.