Another thought from Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, her memoir about teaching her college-level creativity course.

To loosen her students’ creativity, Barry uses a handful of repetitive drawing exercises that on the surface may seem juvenile. For example, she has her students fill a page in their composition books with a giant spiral in pen, instructing them to keep the lines as close as possible without allowing them to touch. While they draw the spiral, she has them listen to a short recording about creativity. Barry believes that the repetitive motion helps her students loosen up their minds and their muscles, freeing them to be more relaxed and spontaneous when they draw.

She also has her students color pages from coloring books or other simple black and white printed illustrations, using crayons. As you might expect, some of the students question this exercise and suggest they would be embarrassed to be caught coloring in a coloring book as homework. But again, as with memory work in writing, Barry wanted her students to practice the physicality of making art more than she wanted them to create an original piece of work, at least right away. She wants her students to lose their inhibitions and judgments about their drawing ability, and instead focus on simple building blocks. I suppose if you spent the day coloring in coloring books, drawing a stick man doodle would seem like classical art in comparison.

Barry’s instructions included filling in as much of the white space on the page as possible with color. Anyone who has colored with crayon knows how hard it is to cover all the white. It takes repetitive strokes and heavy hand pressure to get those layers.

Initially, Barry told her students what to do but not how, and they generally accepted the assignment. In later classes, however, she provided a shortcut, letting students know in advance that they would have to press down hard with their crayons to achieve the desired effect. In contrast to the earlier classes, these students complained about the coloring assignment. They hated it, and Barry realized that the shortcut had taken the pleasure out of discovery. Instead of finding their own method through trial and error, and the pleasure of accomplishment that comes with it, the students experienced the exercise as mere drudgery. Worse, the resentment prevented them from getting into the spontaneous mindset that Barry sought to create.

Writers face this same conundrum. Though we may want someone to tell us how to write well, our teachers can only point us in the right direction. I struggle with plot and often wished I could ask someone what should happen next at a certain point in my story, but it doesn’t work that way. I could ask, I suppose. I might get an answer. I might even get a good answer. But it wouldn’t be my answer and I would never learn what I must if I relied too much on creative handholding.

You can find a lot of good advice and helpful tips for working through craft problems, but ultimately, the work is yours. No one can – or should – tell you how or what to write. Unraveling story knots can be as difficult as covering white paper with crayon. It takes effort and patience. You have to cover the same spots over and over and over. You hand might start to hurt. But when you figure out the solution, you’ll have gained more from the exercise than if someone had given you the cheat code.