Writing Therapy

Lesson 4: Shaping the Feelings

Shaping

Lesson Four, Section Two: Gesture

One of the elements that I have stressed in earlier sections is the gesture as it is manifested in emotion, in writing, and in health. This is because it’s the way I’ve learned to work, but it also has been seen as important in the arts. I happen to appreciate Jackson Pollock, for example, and I like to use him as a model (of an artist if not necessarily of a person). He might well not be your idea of a model artist but I think if you consider it carefully even classical artists do have gestural quality in their work, even though that work night more carefully follow guidelines. The quality of the expressive gesture is what counts artistically and possibly health wise.

As DeSalvo writes, “in the ordering and shaping stage it’s important to follow our intuition about how our work should be organized - what scene should come first, what should follow, what should be juxtaposed with what, and how it should end. This Involves and openness to our creation, to the form it has started to take without our realizing it. (Writing as a Way of Healing),” Intuition will be coming up again in the next section and it is one of those qualities we all know but nobody has ever defined. It is actually, I think, something we all know without knowing that we know.

Ordering of course can be orderly or ‘messy’. It can also work or not for you. I’d like you here to take a step back from what you’ve done and into yourself, perhaps take a few breaths and become aware of your bodily feelings. Then take a look at your work and feel how you want to change it. Have any of you felt like changing What you had done before?

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