One of my favorite writing mantras is from author Ron Carlson: “Don’t think, write.” Another is my own sentence, “Intention kills the meaning-making.”

What I’ve found is that coming to the page with a sense of anticipation about not knowing what will arrive fosters the rising of deep meanings from the midst of the images I gather and the observations I make. To ensure this will happen, I must allow, not censor the images that arrive, and then I must listen to the them, rather than think hard about what I want them to say, without having decided ahead of time what I wanted to accomplish.

Here are four exercises I’ve developed that help writers train themselves to give up intention so they can allow deeper, unexpected feelings and experience to surface.

I suggest doing these exercises in any order and even over again as a template for writing without thinking and intention. Writing this way will help you find out how deep you can go when you aren’t worrying about how to start and why you are writing. 

Exercise 1: Consider Awards
Write lists of:

• Awards you’ve won
• Awards you could have won if they existed
• Awards you’d rather not have won
• Awards you’ll never win
• Awards others win that make you envious

Next, choose two or three or four or more items from your lists and write about the rewards in detail, using your imagination for the awards that don’t exist.

Look at the lists and the details. Select some that seem to go together for you and keep writing until you feel a sense of satisfaction, a sense that you have arrived somewhere that you didn’t expect to arrive. What do you know now that you didn’t know when you started?

Exercise 2: Look at Things You Have Around You
Look at things in your house, car yard and/or your workplace. Choose one and write a passage about it–what it looks, feels, sounds, tastes and smells like, how it got where it is, what you think when you see it, why it may have been valuable to you or neglected by you, what plans you have for it in the future.

After you finish writing about one thing, write about the next one that interests you from your list. And so on.

Don’t worry about how you will connect them or in what order the segments may eventually go. The unconscious will do that later (it has a kind of providential way of directing the explorer in you) and the shaper in you will notice this guidance and be in tune with how providence has directed the explorer. After you arrange the sections in an order that seems to build toward evocation and insight, seek a title that can steer a potential reader toward the connections you feel emotionally among the things you wrote about, “Clutter,” “Love,” Desperate,” for example.

Exercise 3: Question
Think of a question you have that you have not been ready to answer or may not have a definitive answer. With that question in the back of your mind (like a water mark on a piece of fine stationery) write:

• A paragraph about what is outside your window right now.
• A anecdote something you see there makes you remember.
• A list of promises you have made and kept
• A list of promises you have made but can not keep
• A list of promises you will never make
• A paragraph about what is inside your window.

Let your self go in the writing; again, don’t worry about how it all connects. Allow and listen. Don’t force.

Keep on writing as specifically as you can, and you will produce evocative writing that finds an emotional center of gravity, an emotional occasion, even if you don’t think you have one, with more ease than if you sat down with an intent to answer the question you had posed. In fact, the writing is likely to evoke situations and feelings attached to that question that you had no idea you wanted to or could write about.

Exercise 4: Musings, Tidbits and Meditations
Sit in a room, a garden, a house or in a museum or gallery or gift shop. Notice three objects you can see from where you are seated. Write down their names. Write a passage for each object choosing from any prompt in the following menu. Be sure to chose a different prompt for each of the three objects. And be sure in each of the passages to include details so the object is very present rather than an abstraction.

The prompts:

1. the most important memory you have associated with the object
2. a fantasy you have when you look at the object
3. why you wish this object wasn’t there
4. if you were to name the object after a person who that would be, why
5. what having this object makes you miss having

When you have written about all three, put them in an order that pleases you. Then provide a title that includes the location where you are sitting: “In Portland’s Famous Rose Garden,” “In My Father’s Workshop,” “By the Bridge Troll Under Aurora in Fremont,” for instance.

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There you have it. Don’t think, write. Don’t worry about what the piece you are writing is going to be. Let it be. Let it become. Enjoy what you are doing. In the end the writing will probably knock your socks off!