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| Jodie Toohey |
Jodie Toohey has two selections
in the MWC Creative Writing Primer: "Writing as Creative Practice" and "Technique in Poetry." The Other Side of Crazy, her second collection of poetry is set for release by 918studio in September. Her first collection was Crush and Other Love Poems forGirls (2008),
and in 2012, she authored the novel, Missing Emily: Croatian Life Letters, a correspondence between two teen girls, one living in the United States and the other in Croatia,
who deal with their own turmoil, one of deep depression and the other of civil
war, through pen pal letters during the early 1990s. When she is not writing
novels or poetry, Jodie helps people say what they want to say through her
professional writing and editing business, Wordsy Woman Words Sales and Service. She lives in Iowa with her husband, daughter, son, cat, and dog.
In her writing guides, Writing Down the Bones and Wild
Mind, Natalie Goldberg encourages readers to practice timed free writing.
The key to timed free writing is not that you write five minutes, or ten
minutes, or twenty minutes, but it is what you do when you think you are
finished. You set the timer for five or ten minutes more and keep going. The
reason? You will often be surprised, even startled, by what your creative brain
spits out when it thinks the free writing is over.
I have followed this practice many times during my writing
life, and am always amazed at how well it works. Often, in those last few
minutes, the meat or the meaning of what I was trying to say falls out onto my
paper. This surprise in writing is one of the reasons why I love it so much.
But free writing is not the only place where I enjoy surprise in writing.
During the poetry session of a writing workshop I led, I
borrowed my daughter’s poetry magnets and gave each participant and myself a
small, random handful. The group and I were almost astonished by the beautiful
poems our brains produced with these random words. Everyone created pieces with
meaning and insight. I’m not a brain scientist and it isn’t important how they
do it, but it fascinates me how our brains can take random things and put them
together to create something concrete and meaningful.
The best poems I’ve ever written are dripping with surprise.
When I free write, many times I merely pay attention to the words flying
through my head and I copy them down in my journal. As I’m writing, they seem
random, independent, and not connected at all. Often when I’m done, I have an
entire poem that I think is just comprised of haphazard words. But then I read
it. Sometimes it happens immediately and sometimes it doesn’t happen until I
read it maybe months of even years later, but I find meaning. A real,
honest-to-goodness poem with insight and meaning my brain created when I was
just paying attention to individual words. Usually, I’ll need a few words added
to cement the meaning, but it is all there in the original transcription.
Even what I initially fear are mistakes in my writing
sometimes end up being my brain actually saying what it meant to say. For
example, the title poem of my poetry collection, The Other Side of Crazy, starts off with “Peddle down the street,
past salted pines.” When the initial proof came, I thought, Oh no, I made a mistake. Peddle means
to sell something and pedal a bicycle is what I actually envisioned. But
then I read through the rest of the poem and I remembered when I wrote it. I
was in the middle of a prospect-calling campaign for my business and I realized
the poems described precisely how I felt about cold calling. And peddle
actually fits better. So I kept it.
Surprise in writing practice can manifest in many different
ways; the writer just needs to be open to it. And believe. But there’s a catch:
you have to be writing to find it.
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