How to write a butterfly, instead of pinning it down.

There’s an essay by Ann Patchett that has stayed with me for years. She calls the idea for a book a butterfly, gorgeous and alive and brilliant with colours. Here is how she describes writing the idea down:

“When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin.”

Seeing your butterfly pinned to cardboard is one of the most common and disheartening experiences writers have, and for good reason. Creative writing works at the edge of what language can do. The thinking mind wants to label things, but in doing so, it intellectualizes them. This saps the life force right out of the writing.

You can shift this process when you stop trying to pin the butterfly down with words, and learn how to become the butterfly, in and through your writing.

To do this, you must use your whole mind, and practice feeling and thinking at the same time.

First stir up the feeling so it is alive in your body, then start writing. Let go of the intellectual control. Trust that your words will transmit the energy of your ideas, not just label them.

This is a real skill, not a quick one-and-done. Freewriting is the practice that helps most.

Freewriting trains your mind to stay in the aliveness of the experience as you write. My first lesson in the Story Course teaches a specific approach to freewriting that many writers find transformative. If you’d like a starting point, Essential Principles will help you develop a whole-minded practice.

When you write with your whole mind, you can lose your sense of self. This releases you from the stuck feeling of being separate from what you are writing about, and you are free to become the butterfly.

Photo credit (top): Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash.