Freedom

Just had a good supervision session with Kathleen Fallon today. She encouraged me to use my imagination when it came to one of my characters going mad- or experiencing a psychotic breakdown. I'm wary of misrepresenting this state, my best friend's mother has schizophrenia and so does my grandmother. But Kathleen has told me to let go a little and go crazy with it (no pun intended) to loosen up my writing. She says there's a great deal of careful craft in my writing but it needs some wildness in it.
Think about what you want to read, she has advised me. What will hold you to the page. Extremes do hold you and a kind of voyeurism when it comes to madness. I attended a living poetry session that was themed madness, and they talked about the preconceptions of what "mad" writing looks like. I think I can do this writing on paper but perhaps not type it straight away. Typing requires a form of concentration in my mind, and pre formation rather than automatic or wild like writing.