Writing 101 ~ The structural breath
How to be chaotic AND have structured writing?
3 years, now.
3 years ago I was trying to write articles about my obssessio... interests.
Picture it: a hundred pages on the desk. Each one with the beginning of a becoming masterpiece. None finished, none published.
Some of them are articles-wanting-to-be-books, others are short-stories-wanting-to-be-sagas.
On the desktop, a page darken by words, here too.
Yes. I finally managed to go beyond the blank page but...
I CAN’T GET MY SHIT TOGETHER.
Chaos.
Dear, full, georgous chaos: that was my process.
Painful chaos.
But now things are very different: fast forward to today. This article is the 12th in 10 days, and I’m not even sweating.
This is really crazy, when I think about it. Some people enjoy erotic dreams, I’m living mine right now.
How? What changed? Time for the plot twist:
Nothing.
I am still completely chaotic.
My process is full of it. Dear, adorable, lovely chaos.
Not painful anymore; that is the only thing that changed. I embraced chaos as part of the process, and made it the central character.
I’ll tell you why chaos was so painful, why it was impossible for me to actually finish any writing: that was because I was focusing too much on the structure. I was trying hard to have something following the ones I’ve learned, how to structure a book, a scene, how to structure an article, an argument... finefinefine.
That is the worst thing to do:
Applying external structure to your internal flow.
Learning about how to structure my writing came with a blessing and a curse.
The blessing is that it gave me a structure.
The curse is that it gave me a structure.
We have separated the process from the product. Very wrong thing to do. I could give you entire lectures on the theoretical perfect structure for writing; give it many names, hero’s journey, kishotenketsu, pisa, papa, chupachups, whatever. But we all know that theory and practice can be... very distinct things. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to adapt the theory to the practice and that is exactly what we will do here and now. Let’s go.
When you have a neurodivergent mind like mine, well... diverging happens quite often you know. This is necessary for creativity.
We can operate in 2 modes: divergent and convergent.
Imagine divergent being a balloon growing full of air: you add and add and add. Inside, every molecule of air is an idea wanting to get out. To doing so, you need to stop growing the balloon and let air escape through the... tunnel? Don’t know how to call that. This is convergent mode. focused, laser pointed output in the opposite of divergent mode wich is multiplying in every direction inputs.
Divergent and convergent are two energies of a polarity you may know through many other names:
Chaos and order
Feminine and masculine
Dark and light
Negative and positive
In and out
You and me ;)
So we see that a creative mind operates by default in chaos (wich is synonymous of creativity) at the opposite of a dominant convergant corporate mind for example.
The first thinks like a tree and the second one thinks like a road: but as we see an article is shaped like a road.
No, the medium is not the problem, as much as I would love to invent a new way to share information through geometrical shapes.
The problem is the balance between chaos and order, or should I dare to say: your understanding of the balance.
See, life is not a mix of things. When you zoom in into anything, you start to see that everything is an oscillation between two opposite states: law of rythm.
So why wouldn’t be the same for an article? mmh?
You may see some glitches in my writing here and there, some passages that seems to be part of another train of thought. They are. Because I write what is on top, and my mind is a washing machine in dry mode 9000 cycles per second.
And still, I manage to have you read that like it is coherent. Because it is:
Structure and coherence are not the same thing.
We seek coherence. Not structure.
Coherence include both sides: order and chaos.
Structure wants only order.
Coherence emerges from inside.
Structure is forced from outside.
Imagine a cube. This article is a cube, spinning 9000 cycles per second like the machine drum. It is touching every point of my brain because I have a very divergent mind: for example when the word “coherence” popped in I couldn’t help but wanting to write an article within the article from this new perspective: Ideas calling ideas. But actually, that’s not the point. let’s go back to the cube. Because this is spinning too much (meaning too chaotic) for me to describe you one face after the other (meaning one chapter or point) I have to do it all at once. Taking what comes when I write just now. And by the end of this article hopefully I will have covered enough faces of the spinning cube for you to recognize the shape in retrospective.
And this is where coherence comes from: the cube.
I struggle to go to the point of this article, I tell you. It spins fast today. I can feel the centrifugal force pushing me out towards new subject before I can finish this one. That is why before writing I always use an anchor.
This anchor is the cube. Previous article, it was a tetrahedron, ect. I need to know the point I want to make before starting, and I anchor it within a concept. This works for non fiction only: for fiction, I’m still figuring it out.
Today, the cube is called “the structural breath”. I know what I mean by that, and it takes me this whole chaotic article to go to the central point and fight the centrifugal force.
Without knowing where I go, I’ll just be ejected immediatly.
You know, as usual, my goal is to be as concise and precise as possible: this forces me to enter more convergent mode and get it back to balance between chaos and order.
And this is where the structural breath is very important.
before, I was starting from a simple point, a simple problem, and would expand into infinity. So never finishing.
But think about a breath. In, out, in. Divergent, convergent, divergent. Chaos, order, chaos.
So. I get rid of all your structures. As of now, I can only manage to maintain the simplest shape: a breath.
order
chaos
order
That’s it. That’s the structural breath, the point I’m trying to go to since the beginning. But as usual (and I knew it would happen) I did diverge a little bit...
To expand a bit the idea, I always start with something concrete to anchor myself.
the best kind of anchor for an article is a problem.
I am too chaotic to structure my writing.
This is the one for today.
Then, I allow myself some room to diverge. This is actually the article, where I can spin freely BUT staying around this problem.
Then comes the final anchor, the solution. to not fly too far, we need to come back on earth when possible.
Today, it was the structural breath.
problem
kjdbczilqkdnklejdn
solution
concrete
abstract
concrete
That’s it. I cannot structure more... and should I?
Let me share not theory but experience now. With time I start to feel the structure of a piece I write like this one. I start to feel the threads of thoughts flying around me, and I become more and more flexible and good at sewing an article from scratch. I can’t take it all in, so I learn to discern and prioritise. Every piece is an egregore and has its own shape, its own life... its own internal structure.
Who am I to force a cube into a triangle? No, let the piece itself decide the shape. And this, my friend, doesn’t require to learn any structure.
No.
It requires 2 things:
inner eye
grounding
The inner eye helps you perceive the shape of what wants to be born instead of having to impose an external one.
The grounding gives you the weight to take down this baby helium balloon full of ideas into physical shape.
Divergent mode, and so divergent minds, is making you fly up there into the etheral realms of toughts. grounding is what makes you balance this with convergent mode.
I am quite sensitive to energies, and I can physically feel when my root chakra is ungrounded and all the energy starts to blow into my brain. That is not good. There is imbalance between body and mind. Yes, writing requires physical work for me. I need an awful amount of sport to stay both feet on earth. This is an absolute necessity and trust me when I tell you that grounding is 90% of what allows me to finish and “structure” my articles. The last 10% are for the structural breath.
I struggled with grounding mostly because of hypersensitivity. Hell, I tought I was insensible until recently because I blocked it all. Easier to fly up there isn’t it?
feeling is what I still fear, the intensity of the world. I am not ungrounded. I unground myself unconsciously, sometimes consciously, in order to feel less.
This may be very different for everybody, but I hope this can help someone.
To me, grounding = feeling.
See how an article about structuring a piece of writing ends up “you must accept your feelings”?
We really are not simple creatures.
I hope this structurally unstructured mess helped you somehow.
Peace,
Evan
I'm happy to hear (and read) your progress. Keep it up. Moving out of that chaos is a great step forward.
You're doing it! Hooray!