Overview:

I wrote the original version of this piece as a creative writing assignment during my time as a graduate writing coach at the UNC Writing Center.

Challenge:

Each writing coach has a unique approach, so rather than traditional bios, we were asked to write a response to the question, “What is writing like for you?”

During our training for this position, we workshopped our drafts with other writing coaches as a way to practice the same techniques we use for the University students and staff who make up our clientele.

Strategy:

I’m a visual thinker, so writing is the process that I use to puzzle through the nuances of imagery and words. My goal was to lament, poke fun at, and celebrate how both the concept and activity of writing (including the things we choose to write about) can often lead to insight simply because it can be so many things and take so many forms. Similarly, I use homophones, homonyms, synonyms, and synonymic definitions to represent the potential complexities of the word “knot.” 

I liked my piece so much that I later expanded and submitted it to Short Édition’s Long Story Short competition under creative non-fiction. It received over a hundred views and more support than I could have imagined. And although I did not win, this exercise was an excellent experience.

Enjoy!

Writing Is Like Unraveling a Knot

Writing is like unraveling a knot.

It always seems to turn out that the twistiest jumbles are easiest to pick apart, while the simplest snarls morph into a recursion of stuck-fast loops in loops.

To ensure our efforts are not for naught, we ought to be clear what a knot is or what it’s not. After all, sometimes a knot is not a knot. Many are tangles, more are bows―and the unraveling is how we make sense of those.

Ah, the multicursal knot.

Is it a tightness in the belly that concerns the doctor, a bottleneck in the doorway from impatient kids, the clots in your state-of-mind during a tricky pop quiz, a unit of speed for sailors to mark their travels, a link that couples tie to seal the bonds of marriage, a hidey-hole for birdies formed in the blemish of a tree, a kink in the muscle for the masseuse to knead?

The first step to writing is often not the writing, but unraveling its purpose―how should I do it, for whom, to what end?

Writing is like unraveling a knot because once done, we are free to weave something greater than the challenge it represented: a new line of thinking, a web of relationships, a net to catch the imagination, a mesh of perspectives, a tress of the braid in a work of art.

Your approach makes all the difference, for there are no Gordian Knots.