Have you ever been to a caterpillar race?
In Banner Elk, North Carolina, the woolly bear that reaches the finish line first is said to predict the winter ahead. The blacker the worm, the colder and snowier the winter. The browner the milder.
Yet in the spring, those caterpillars don’t care whether they satisfied an old wives’ tale. They don’t recall (or even know) whether they had more or less brown or black fuzz all over.
But they do need that fuzz—regardless of color. They won’t awaken until the charged sensors in those bristly hairs tell them the time is right to thaw.
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Have you ever felt hairs standing on end before you transformed an idea into a story or poem or essay on the page?
Or perhaps your writing was in stasis until you sensed a thaw on its way?
Or you knew, finally, it was time to move into a new phase—corral poems into a collection.
Take your plot through an outline. Warm up to a new draft.
Start a new chapter, or inch closer to finally penning “the end.”
Maybe, like me, you’ve paused as you started new work, or as you returned to revise–paused with pen in hand, as if putting feelers out to sense whether the conditions are right.
A pause that provided focus–until it lingered into hesitation, lengthened into doubt. And you froze.
When that happens to me, it helps to know I’m not alone. That there are other writers all around, doing the same thing. Testing, pausing, freezing—thawing. Emerging from a stasis—or from one phase to the next in the creative process.
In fact, it’s possible to work through that writing process along with others, in the solitude of one’s own writing space.
Sounds like a contradiction—shared solitude. But as Walt Whitman says, what’s wrong with a little contradiction when you contain multitudes?
I’m talking about something called “livewriting.” A conceptually shared writing space with room for shared multitudes—creative emergence at multiple desks all at once, yet apart from one another virtually.
My writing mentor, Katey Shultz, is offering a month of free livewriting—EMERGE—starting Monday. (Yes, a whole month! Starting April 4th.)
But just what is livewriting, exactly? Here’s Katey:
Livewriting is a mostly silent, real-time writing experience celebrating the creative process. It seems counterintuitive to come together, in silence, to write → but this gentle, collective accountability WORKS because we all experience the value of shared vulnerability. When that happens, writers start worrying less about harsh goals and, instead, focus on the validation they experience by being uplifted in their community and associating positive energy with the habit of writing.
Livewriting isn’t a competition, or a race. It’s simply that shared act of being with others in the midst of coaxing writing as it emerges. Being with others in the imperfect perfection of the creative process—sometimes it’s raw, sometimes cooked. It’s always a transformative act of discovering and letting go and emerging into next new thing.
So I’m taking the leap into Livewriting with Katey in April, and I hope you’ll join us. It’s even better than racing caterpillars.