Unbox Your Words #1a

Give yourself permission to play with your writing in new and exciting ways

Welcome to this very first Unbox Your Words - Give Yourself Permission to Play! Whatever you’re writing (stories/poems/nonfictions/hybrids/novels etc…) and wherever you are on your own writing journey - at the beginning and wondering if the words will come, or along the road but feeling like you want to shake things up, take a side turn, see if your words can dance in different ways - I am so excited about what we are going to explore together! (To read a bit about why I’ve decided to do this and what it means to me, check out my Sept Highly Irregular newsletter)

There will be two parts to each monthly Unbox Your Words: on the 10th of every month, I’ll offer you some kind of writing provocation, prompt or exercise to do, either to inspire new work or to help refresh a work-in-progress - or maybe both, depending on how much time you have. Then, at some random point later in the month, when you’re needing a little shot of energy, I’ll send you something to read, which might be a creative piece I’ve come across, or an interview with a writer or artist…

These Unbox Your Words posts are also open to comments - I’d love to hear from any of you who’d like to share how you found the provocation/prompt/exercise and the reading material. This is a place not to post new work, but for us to discuss and create community, giving not just ourselves but each other permission to play and try things in our writing we might not have thought we were allowed to do.

Let’s get started! For this first post, I am offering you both a writing provocation and, down the bottom, a video writing exercise, Word Cricket, which I play at the beginning of every writing workshop I run… and which you can do as many times as your like.

Your writing provocation is:

Move The Bed

This might not have been what you were expecting. Have I wandered into an interior design Substack by mistake?, you may be thinking. Nope. Let me explain…

At the same time as I started planning Unbox Your Words a few months ago, I decided to move my bed. Only two feet, further away from the wall by the window. My bed had been in exactly the same position since I arrived here 6 years ago and I thought it was time to mix things up a bit. I would shift the bed away from the wall with the big window, I thought, and put my bedside table on the other side of the bed, between it and the wall. A small change, I thought. Turned out this “small change” was anything but…

What I realised after I shifted everything (and hoovered parts of the room that hadn’t seen any love for quite a while), and sat down on the bed was something I hadn’t expected: everything felt different. Not only was I looking at the entire room from a new angle, and not only was I reaching for things on the bedside table with my left hand instead of my right, I could see things I’d never seen before. I could see the part of the wall radiator that stretched behind the curtain and the bookshelf. I hadn’t seen this since I moved in. And I could see the back of the gold-painted birdcage that was on the floor next to the radiator and the bookshelf. These don’t sound very exciting, but I was thrilled and a little overwhelmed that what I had thought was an almost insignificant furniture adjustment had revealed things that had been hidden.

This feeling of everything being different lasted for weeks, and being a writer, I wrote a little bit about it in my bedside notebook (which was now on the other side of the bed, too.) I was unsettled, and I love being unsettled; I think this is a great state for any writer to temporarily find themselves in and to explore.

So I suspect you’re getting my metaphor by now, about breaking habits, trying to see things with fresh eyes. Breaking writing habits is a big part of giving ourselves permission to play, and first we have to identify what our habits might be.

But what I am inviting you to do is

actually move the bed

It may be that in your household this requires consultation with another person, or it may be impossible given your bedroom. If so, is there something else almost as significant in terms of daily use that you can move or adjust? If you start your day with a hot drink, how about moving the kettle to the other side of the kitchen? What is something else that if you moved it, you’d find it unsettling, you’d have to stop and think instead of reaching for it like always? Or are there pictures on the wall that you see everyday that you could swap around?

Once you’ve done this, you might want to jot down something about how it affects you, riff on any aspect of this that you find interesting.

And then, think how you might add a shot of moving-the-bed freshness to your own writing. A different pen, a new font, moving your usual writing space? Break a habit, see what happens.

I might really have hated the bed being two feet from the wall, the bedside table (which I could now put more books on, it turned out) being on that side. I might then have chosen to move it back. But once I had moved what is mostly seen as an immoveable object, I had already opened something up, created another option, seen new angles and hidden corners. Try it - and let us know in the comments what transpires for you!

And here’s a writing exercise for you to do - you might do it sitting on your newly-shifted bed or writing desk, see what happens!

Word Cricket - Let’s Play!