There are diminishing returns in receiving a formal education for creative writing. I have a BFA and an MFA, and consider the experience of earning the MFA to be the greatest regret of my adult life. It’s not that I didn’t learn all the skills I needed to learn: craft, analysis, criticism, cold reading, writing for a cold read. It’s that learning these skills, and perpetually reinforcing them, clutters the font from which the writing itself springs. For me, this eventually meant no more writing.

Natalie Goldberg’s classic book Writing Down the Bones links the mindset necessary for writing to the Zen Buddhist concept of beginner’s mind. People much more eloquent than me have written their thoughts on the American woowoofication of Zen Buddhism, but what I do think is helpful is the concept that the writing mindset is served best by shedding all our baggage when we come to the drafting table. This is easier said than done.

I’ve heard from basically every writing professor I’ve had that you draft with an open, free mind and edit with a cluttered, critical mind. Then, every one gives your critical mind more strength, more practice, more tools. The open, free mind? Where all the fun of the writing happens? That’s left to figure out on your own.

At this point, I feel pretty confident I know what I need to do when it comes to the structures and institutions of the writing world. Now, I want to reverse engineer my education and get back to the mindset that made me choose to waste my formative educational years on two degrees that did virtually nothing to improve my life. I want to get back to the self who was so desperate just to write that I insisted on attending these programs.

I am trying to design for myself a Do Over program. I want to return to some foundational texts on creative writing and try again, to give myself enough fun experiences with writing that it reprograms my institutionalized mindset. I’ve decided to start with The Poet’s Companion, which I’ve owned for a while and not done much with.

These are the rules I’ve outlined for myself, and why:

1. I will go through the books in a linear fashion and at my own pace. Some of these books are designed to work more like reference texts (where you seek out the resources you need as needed) or propose a schedule to the reader (The Artist’s Way famously assigns a ridiculous amount of work to complete per week). I don’t consider myself a wise and all-knowing person, but one of the things I like to think I’ve learned is that there’s no reward for neglecting one’s life in service to one’s writing. In fact, as I write again, I want to discourage the pathologies that come with prioritizing one’s writing over one’s work, relationships, and obligations.
2. I will follow the prompts that speak to me and post the results. Part of my over-educated pathology is incessant mental chatter about “markets” and “publication” and other things that poison the writing process. During my Do Over, I will intentionally use up my First North American copyrights so that any such thinking is futile (and hopefully made irrelevant to my writing).
3. I will redact any parts of my poems that are too personal or intimate. Workshopping, performing, and publishing poetry comes with way too much trauma dumping and oversharing. The older I get, the more I find it weird the things I was willing to reveal to audiences of actual strangers who aren’t invested in my personal well-being. In my personal life, I really am quite private, so I think it’s worth intentionally recalibrating what about myself I am willing to share.
4. I will pass over any tasks or prompts that don’t speak to me. I have put in my time with exercises and requirements and structures intended to make you better at writing whether you enjoy them. Over the years, I have also done a lot of the same prompts over and over, and some have definitely become cultural memes that perpetually resurface. Any exercise I encounter will be treated like a springboard and not like a taskmaster.