What We Know and What We Don't Know: Lesson 5

"Free-write": guided imagery

Writing teachers often say, “Write what you know.” There’s some truth to this advice that we’re going to experiment with in this lesson.

Most writing teachers say that you can’t teach the invention. That’s because those of us who do it go to an imaginative place we don’t fully understand: The place where the mystery of invention happens. And to tell the truth, we don’t actually know how we did what we did in a piece of writing that soars, that inexplicably can’t be easily analyzed and yet moves the reader. I’m gonna show you how to do just that.

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Because I teach and write and because I get lost myself sometimes trying to find my way, I’ve done a lot of thinking, reading and teaching on how to find the mystery that we all had as children—when imagination didn’t scare us. The secret? The invention lies in the “not knowing.”

But how to get there?