Casino

Suffering-free activist writing – Casino for Social Transformation

Writing is an important way to communicate about, work through, and reflect on our movements and struggles. It is also a vital part of our struggles, because it’s a way to understand, think through, and record what we’re doing and thinking. The capacity to write with ease, joy, and fluidity is rare: it is crushed in us through formal schooling, bad teachers, and a world that fundamentally doesn’t mind if activists have a hard time putting our thoughts to paper. Many of us deal with the challenge of writing by waiting for deadlines to run us down so that we have to produce something, anything – using crises to force ourselves through the panic and boredom writing can induce. Others simply don’t write at all. Generative AI intensifies the existential question of whether writing is part of our meaning-making activity as people engaged in social movements.

Usually, the ways that writing is bad and useless come directly out of the conditions and methods that school has trained us to use. Writing with ease is about class, race, rurality, gender, and more; people raised with money, time, “good” schools, parents who didn’t work nights, and so on tend to read and write more easily, and have more entitlement in their writing. People who write from lived experiences that counter these norms are frequently told, implicitly and explicitly, that they have nothing worthwhile to say, or that they are constitutionally incapable of writing.

When writing is not understood as an important part of our movement work, the people who end up producing writing about anarchist currents and movements are academics and journalists; because they are often not directly engaged in organizing (or are attempting to use their reflections on work they are involved with also for their own academic or journalistic careerism), they reflect on our work badly. Successful academic writers have dysfunctions specific to academe, which are carried into attempts at writing that might be relevant or useful to activists, organizers, regular non-academic people, and movements. A lot of radicals who write carry these academic habits, because that’s where we learned to write and think.

I think that oppressive social relations create constrained, frantic, and painful writing practices that reinforce existing hierarchies and power imbalances – and which then limit our capacities to resist oppression. Writing can, on the contrary, be a liberatory practice both individually and as a movement-building skill. So, yay!

Telling the truth about/in our writing practice
* Writing is a form of thinking – it’s not just a record of what we thought, it’s a way of understanding and making meaning. This really matters. We should tell the truth, but also we should understand that how we tell things helps us and others bring new worlds into being. * * No one but you knows what will work for your actual writing practice. First, play and experiment, then structure your material and psychic writing realities according to what actually works for you.

Attitudes toward your writing

* Writing as a very personal, frequently vulnerable thing. At the same time, a very public thing, often something you mean to accomplish something with. So: striking a balance.

* Relocating the writing outside you – and thus as something that can be worked on.

[Not too tight, not too loose; Creator vs. Editor; Maitri; Difference between pain (inevitable) and suffering (not inevitable)]

Taking a view:

See the piece of writing as:

A whole; A serious work, but also an experiment; Something you can make decisions about now, not later (title, length, audience, goal, etc)

[exercise: write down what a piece of writing’s working title, length, audience, and purpose is]

Beginning the writing process

* Hold your writing in mind while you read, go to actions, etc. Take notes that include your opinion/ thoughts: what you’re thinking “for now” about your thoughts: have a charge.

* Use the tone in these notes that you will use in the piece of writing itself: the rhetorical choices you make are choices, and they start early.

Pre-writing, writing, revision

 [exercise: freewrite, ten minutes] [exercise: mind mapping]

Time management

* Since you will not get everything done, consider what has to be done. Not everything is as important as everything else.

* Managing guilt, more than time.

* 80/20 rule Understand revision and pre-writing as just as significant as writing.

* Aim for concentrated, dedicated time in writing

1. Planning ahead

2. 45 minute units

3. Project weeks

4. Stop time for any given day

5. Taking a day off, as entitlement not reward

Writing mindfully, with moderation.

 [exercise: think/talk: is there a time when you decide to write? If not, when could this be an ordinary part of your life?] [what does it mean to resist romantic ideals of inspiration/crash writing?]

Comradely feedback = valuable commodity. Brief them well.

The memo cover-letter: always include:

“Dear name, Here is “…” (V. specific: # pages, what they do, what stage of draft they are at, where they fit into the whole project, what their purpose is). The main thing I want my reader to understand or believe at the end of the piece is …. . I would like feedback on these three things…”

Prepare your friends/ lovers/ family/ spouse/ children for your writing process
Consider forming a small, manageable, functional, trustworthy writing group.
Respond to feedback and also hold your ground

Knowing when to stop or pause

* Usually we know it’s time to stop because we’re past deadline, or it’s the very last minute.

Is your procrastination telling you something important about form or missing content?

* Check in with self, pre-readers: given clear goals for a given piece of writing, how close are you to meeting them? Through-line: does each part of the writing speak to your overall purpose? Would a reader be able to say what you mean to do at each point in the piece?

[Back outlining, Notecarding, Colour-coding and re-mapping]