On letters-in-progress and breaking writer’s blocks

My experiences at “Living Letters” by Iffat Nawaz

It was the end of a long weekend. I had done very little over the three days. I was hoping that the last day held something refreshing, otherwise I would be walking into the weekday disappointed and un-motivated.

Thanks to this workshop, I hopes were answered.

I met Iffat apu back in 2022, when she was consulting our team on a rather interesting project. Our working group ended up travelling to quite a few beautiful places, discovering some interesting stories, and had thought provoking conversations. We also had a sneak peak into the first paragraph of her book “Shurjo’s Clan” (read it, its a masterpiece!), and so even walking into this workshop I knew it would be great. In fact, that was the only thing that managed to get me to get out of the house, in that otherwise depressing weekend.

We started with an affirmation of what we wanted out of the workshop. “I aspire for peace, understanding and elevation”, I scribbled down without delay. I badly needed all three. I have been feeling stuck in sludge and I needed to rise above it.

We then were directed through a meditation exercise. I usually do not like guided meditation all that much, but I did like this one, as we started with focusing on the tangible tensions from head to toe that we hold even in a resting position. We don’t often think about how we are plagued by stress even in our resting positions. Exercises like this that push us to think about it and then perhaps release that stress, I love.

My favourite part of the session came next. We did a “word throw” exercise, where Iffat apu would give us a word or phrase every few seconds, and we would have to use that phrase to write each line of a story.

The prompts started with something very tangible, so I wrote a line about a tangible thing. But as the words kept coming I was struggling to keep the story going in that same direction. I had to think on my feet and make quick changes until I noticed I had reinterpreted that initial realistic paragraph into surreal experience. It went on, with the prompts leading me through a twisting and turning path. I had started the piece with something very positive- Light- and at one point it occurred to me that the only interesting way forward for me was to paint this very positive thing in a negative light (pun intended!).

And thus surreal turned into philosophical, and as I ended the piece after the last prompt, I realised that I had ended up with a very interesting philosophical argument on using a critical lens on things that seem to be all good and all evil to understand the flipside of the concept.

You can read the digitised (and lightly polished) version of the piece here.

I loved this section so much because it was a simultaneously a challenge to connect lines into meaning very quickly, and also a perfect antidote to my perfectionism and procrastination, which make up my writer’s block on a regular day. For the first time in a long time, I just wrote. Not from critical thought, but from the true desires and feelings of my brain.

Finally, we went to the letters.

The concept of “Living Letters” is simple- we tend to write long pieces when a person has passed away which they will not have an opportunity to read. What if, instead, we wrote these letters to loved ones who are still here? What if these letters can be a way to let out complicated feelings?

This is of course, a very difficult thing to do, especially since you are often writing to someone with whom you have a complicated relationship. Thankfully, we were guided through a process of building resources from which we could write. This certainly made the writing easier.

In the end, I left the workshop with a letter to my mother that I need to sit with and edit, so that one day I may give it to her to read. I mentioned this to her and she said she wanted to write one for me too.

In the beginning of the workshop, when asked to write down my aspiration for the day, I wrote “I aspire for peace, understanding and elevation”. At the end of it, I was certainly feeling more at peace, understood myself a little better and even though my letter wasn’t complete, I did feel lifted into a state quite lighter than the one I was in when I walked in.