Unlocked

She wore a red dress that cast smudged shadows on the floor whenever she paced back and forth. She paced a lot. There was almost a pattern to it, to her revolution around that small, grey chair in the centre of the room, as if she would make that the focus of our attention and not herself. She said she had come here to share secrets.

I had come here twenty minutes late, half winded from the mad dash across the overflowing car park and then the stairs of the Old Fire Station. She hadn’t looked at me as I came barrelling in, with one mortified apology waiting on my lips. Instead, I was left to grope around wildly for a seat, wrestle out my notebook. There was steel in her voice, and soft edges. She spoke of a man named Martindale and his research into the brainwaves of “creatives.” I knocked over the water jug on our table and watched it run in one unbroken line down towards Andrew and Michael. She should have thrown me out.

That she didn’t, this award winning authoress who had agreed to give us a private workshop, that she let me blow in with all my chaos and rudeness, was probably the best thing that happened to me over the weekend. Because the woman in red was Sue Woofle and she had come here to teach us how to write.

It was Day Two of the festival. I had already been to a handful of sessions engineered around the mechanics of writing by now, including a fantastic workshop run by ABC Open Producer, Jane Curtis. This is was not like any of them.

Sue was smaller than I’d expected – at least at first. She seemed to inflate in size as the session drew on; with the air she took from the room, with her slow pacing. It was impossible not to trust her almost immediately. That was surprising too. 

“Really, for me, plot is just suspense.” She said, somewhere towards the end. “Leave it for last.”

She spoke that way a lot, in gentle, melodic progressions, in step with her feet on the carpet. Sometimes, she didn’t speak at all but waited while we wrote or stared or began to fall asleep. She had prompts for us, word association games and one slow unfinished story she recited like a lullaby or a poem. She always waited for us to finish.

It wasn’t quite like meditation, what she was asking of us, but it was close. She called it “loose construing”, writing in the lull, in a changed state of brain activity. That same slippery freedom we let our minds wander down just before falling asleep, or while enjoying a hot shower a little too much.

She had been taught the trick as a child, she said. A friend of the family had told her to stare at the branches of a tree, longer than she wanted to, until she could see the shapes they cut out against the sky, until she wasn’t thinking of branches at all but something else, something unbidden and strange and utterly surprising. That was the thought to cherish, she said. That was the mind’s answer.

I, on the other hand, couldn’t stop thinking of trees. Somewhere in those first flushed minutes, I had been staring at the floor in shame, watching the light falling in the room. It came slicing down behind the black legs of the table and there in the grey green mess of the carpet they became the burnt towers of a forest. I was still staring when she asked the room to write about carpet. What word associations did it kick up? I grinned. It was the tingle of understanding in a dream, like an electric current. I had my pen. My paper was somehow miraculously less soaked through than the rest of my unfortunate table’s. I scribbled down the words “forest” and "shadows" with almost indecent enthusiasm. 

That was my first watered down experience of the lull she spoke of. The next came just fifty minutes later, in the silence spinning out behind a story she told us, deliberately unfinished. Here it is, as best I remember it....

You have been walking for some time in the forest, a long way from your house by the beach. You come to a river you know well. It spills out into the ocean further down but here it is calm and still. As you bend to the river's edge, you hear music rising from the trees on the other side, too faint to recognize but beautiful. It is the most wonderful music you have ever heard. You look around and see there is a boat in the water, as if waiting for you. The music is too far away. You get in the boat and begin to row towards it. 

What you need to look for, Sue said, once you have broken out of that dreaming state, is recurrences. What have you been preoccupied with? What was your mind trying to say in all that bad grammar (no offence) and strange syntax?

Looking back over my awkward scribblings from the workshop, the recurrences are starkly obvious:

It is my father’s voice – the singing. It is the wind playing tricks. It is my father’s voice singing. I have walked here before; can see our footsteps in the muddy sand. I can see them drowning there. I’ve forgotten where I am supposed to be but I can still hear the music. It is like the river has come rushing through the trees. It is only the wind. But, it is singing with my father’s voice. And I have been here before. Dark water like tar. I cannot hear what he is saying. It is only the wind playing tricks. It is only the years between.

There is almost nothing here I would craft into story, but the experience of writing it, in a kind of rhythmic loop with the breath in my lungs, was invaluable. As a writer, my fiercest battle is always with the editor on my shoulder, with the tapping on my knuckles telling me that sentence sounded wrong, that thought isn't clever, that word isn't right. I don't remember this having always been a problem for me. As a teenager, I would write for hours, uninhibited, wildly, and, understandably, I produced a lot of drivel. But, there was usually something shining in there too, something worth saving. Lately, my work is sandwich pressed onto the page, already constructed. It is static and snowed under. I must shovel it aside to get to what I've been trying to say, if I can still remember. 

This passage may not be any good. Indeed, at times, it barely even makes sense. But, it is free and, right now, I think that makes it better than half of what I've had published. 

I may not always be able to write in the lull. I may not have banished the editor from my shoulder forever. But, after Sue Woolfe's Unlocking Creativity workshop, I know I at least stand a fighting chance. 

For that, I have to thank Sue herself....And apologize at last for being so dreadfully late.