Metaphor as change-work

[darkemeralds]

I went to Bev Martin the other day for help with my terribly slow writing. Bev's a hypnotherapist--one of my teachers--and a writer herself. I was sure she could help, and she did.

She used Clean Language, a questioning technique designed to guide the client to her own metaphor of change, completely uninfluenced by the practitioner. It's the inverse of standard hypnotherapy, which explicitly seeks to influence.

All the questions start with "And..." Each question feeds the client's own words back, and never makes assumptions, so the questions are odd and ungrammatical, and your rational mind gives up and hides.



Me: "I love that moment of inspiration, of knowing that I have a new story to write! And when I'm writing well, it's the most fun there is. Then I get lost and start wasting time writing the wrong thing..."

Bev: "And when there is new story to write, what is it?"

Me: "There's a moment when the idea comes to me and I know it's my next story. I can feel it. I'm like a cat at a mouse-hole, completely focused, and it's the best feeling it the world."

Bev: "And when there is know the next story and feel it, where is it?"

Me: "It's here, under my ribcage, in my solar plexus."

Bev: "And when here, under the ribcage, does here have a color?"

Me: It's dark. Black. But luminous. Luminous darkness.

Over the next hour I constructed a detailed, multi-sensory metaphor of story-writing (a pitch-dark museum filled with treasures), including the problem (turning on the lights and seeing everything at once, becoming unfocused and confused) and its solution (spotlights! One at a time!).

The source of the problem was there too: inspiration apparently bears enough neurochemical resemblance to fear that a well-intentioned buffer was kicking in. It looked like a flying saucer, and I made it fly away by showing it that I was having fun, not fear. I also found a tool: my right hand will start twitching the instant the fun level starts to drop.

The session ended with an image of me following a dancing spotlight away down a dark corridor, having as much fun as a cat with a flashlight beam.



Change work without change is just self-indulgence. Any change so far? Well, I got up an hour early yesterday and wrote a missing character in a pivotal scene that I've been avoiding for a month. I think that counts.

Comments

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

Yes! Yes! That's precisely it, and precisely why the method seems especially useful in creative work. I can think of half a dozen scenarios where my search for help solving writer's block and bad writing habits would have resulted only in someone telling me what works for them.

It wasn't till after the session was finished that Bev the practitioner revealed that she had worked on precisely the same issues in her training--writer's block, bad writing habits, desire to finish a book 9nteresting coincidence, to say the least). She described the metaphor she had created, and it was completely different from mine.

Makes me think about how often I've experienced failure by trying to make someone else's success work for me.

[kispexi2.livejournal.com]

Makes me think about how often I've experienced failure by trying to make someone else's success work for me.

And not just in fic?

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of various diets, actually. :D