Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”[1]) is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes (Wikipedia).
What does liminality have to do with writing?
A few years ago, I heard a speaker say that some of the best inspiration comes when a person is in that state between waking and sleeping. He didn’t use the terms “liminality” or “liminal space,” but what he said rang a bell because in my doctoral studies we were just studying the work of Victor Turner who wrote about liminality and ritual in anthropological terms. About the same time I began work on my dissertation and found it to be a wearying, mind-numbing process, but one that required the utmost attention to detail. I also found that I could only write a couple of pages at a time, especially when I started writing after I attended classes, taught classes (I was teaching full time), grading, and doing homework. I was exhausted, but I knew the diss (as we called it) had to be written or all that effort was for nothing. But I was so tired and my brain didn’t want to work on a theoretical level. To make matters worse, there were teenagers and twenty-somethings in my house who loved to stay up late and be noisy (I loved them anyway).
In my very tired mind the idea of inspiration while just waking and Victor Turner’s liminality meshed. I found that if I got up very early in the morning, like 5 a.m., before anyone else in the house awoke, I could get 10 or more pages written before I ran out of steam or had to go to class. I found that I could teach or sit in class while I was tired, but that starting to write while I was fresh, although still tired, was immensely productive. My diss ended up being 540 pages long and I graduated.
Would the same idea of liminality work to write fiction? I decided to try it. It does.
However, there are some tricks that make it even more productive:
1. Read through what you wrote that morning just before going to bed.
2. Snooze button–hit it and think of what you read the night before while you’re waking up.
3. Get up, throw on some sweats, turn on the computer, visit the bathroom while the computer is booting up, open the file you are working on, and start writing.
4. If you don’t immediately get inspiration, go back and read what you wrote the day before.
5. Do not turn on the internet.
6. Do not turn on any media whatsoever.
It works! Using this method, I’ve written thousands of pages, sold articles and books and intend to keep doing so.
Liminal space–the space where creativity is waiting to be found.
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