Shaun Levin

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Going Bigger

In Writing, Writing Exercises on May 23, 2026 at 9:12 am

Start a new and bigger notebook. Go bigger. If you’ve been working in an A5 notebook, go for A4 or even A3. An A3 notebook is huge for a writer but we can handle it. Think like an artist. Writing is art. Nobody benefits from us going smaller. Take up space, even when you’re writing take up space. And seeing as we’re going big with a notebook, why not increase the size of your writing implement. Write with a marker pen, or one of those extra thick marker pens. Shift from an HB pencil to a 8B pencil. Or to charcoal. Enjoy writing big, words that are visible from a distance. Be visible.

Rewriting My Diaries, ink on rice paper, 145cm x 72cm (57″ x 28″)

If you’re frustrated with your writing, if you’re bored or blocked or not sure where to go next, don’t blame yourself, blame the page. It’s not you, it’s it. Maybe you need a bigger page and a bolder writing instrument. Just because writing is related to pen and paper doesn’t mean they have to be the regular sizes. Be irregular. Write on A0 paper with a calligraphy brush. I speak from experience, I freed myself from the confines of the normal notebook and a ballpoint pen – I’m free!!! – and it took me to places I’d never have believed I could be in. I’ve always thought that writing was an art form and have always approached it as an art form, but I never thought that being an artist-artist was a place I could occupy.

I write to you from the artist place. But it’s not just about size. It’s not just about bigger notebooks, bigger pages, bigger pens and pencils. It’s about options and possibilities and not being wedded to one way of doing something. An experiment can be a way of accessing something. Swimming in a pool and swimming in the sea are both swimming. Sitting in the bath and sitting in the shallow waves at the beach are both sitting in water. Not sure the metaphor works, but it feels nice in this twenty minutes of writing. Your page is water. Make it more like the sea and see what happens. Your ink is the waves. Or something like that.

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Evidence of the Attempt

In Writing on April 18, 2025 at 8:41 am

Writing happens in the grasping for language, the clinging and clawing to find the precise words. At the heart of the attempt is the knowledge that we’ll fail. Writing is translating, is approximation. When that attempt at likeness shows, when we see, but more than see, when we feel that attempt, writing becomes exciting. Evidence of that effort, that endeavour doomed to fail, because most of life does not happen in language, is where the excitement of writing exists, and because of that in the reading, too.

The tunnel of translation runs from the body to the page. You can feel that electric wire, that conductor of the current, evidence of the struggle to put into words. First comes the world, then come language. First the body, then language, first hunger, then language, first love. To write is to get as close as possible to the point before sensation turns into words. There was the visual, there was the sensation. Then language tries to do its work, and we cling to our faith that the right words can be found, the precise words. That’s when it gets exciting, when faith and knowing work side by side. Evidence of the mind in its belief and trying.

Drawing and painting is exciting when it’s not precise, when there’s evidence of the mind at work, evidence of the body free of its learning, its training, when the training has been absorbed and forgotten and all there is is freedom. Language is always a learned thing, never entirely free, grappling to be precise and to forget itself. A tension between going towards the experience where there’s no language and yet relying on language to get there. Just one more step, keep going, and language will disappear and be pure experience, pure sensation, pure colour, pure shape, taste, form.

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Style

In Uncategorized, Writing on October 28, 2022 at 10:44 am

Your style is where you fell short but kept going anyway.

I’m not sure that’s true but at the moment it feels like it might be. You aimed for something and you couldn’t do it but what remains is the thing they call style. I say this because someone said “I like your style” and I thought: Style? I can’t even draw! I’ve been learning to draw. At the moment it’s life drawing. I attend regular life drawing classes online and I fall short.

I want to draw the human figure the way the human figure should be drawn, the way it’s drawn in what I guess you’d call traditional ways. Of course, there are also moments when I think, no, that’s not what I want. I just want to have fun and play. I want to see what I can do with what I have, with what comes naturally (if there is such a thing). Maybe that’s what style is. If you’re having fun, that’s probably a sign you’re writing or drawing or painting in a way you feel at home in. Despite and maybe because of that nudging nagging feeling that I should be doing it properly. I should be writing great family sagas, historical dramas, doing what Jane Austen did, what Dostoevsky did, what VS Naipaul did, what all those robust writers did. Big grand novels. What Caravaggio did, Virginia Woolf, even, Picasso, even, if you look at his earlier work, at Hilma af Klint’s earlier work. But you look at their earlier work, even the work of Kandinsky, for example, and you realise that what they were doing at the beginning was not their style, or at least the style they are known for.

Style is the opposite of tradition. Or a conversation with tradition. Or a refuting of tradition, a skill for those who once did it the traditional way. At some point we thought that’s what writing should be. Traditional. Tradition was all we had to refer to, at least most of the time. It’s what everyone was doing so should we be doing it too, writing like that, drawing like that, painting like that. As I gradually immerse myself in the world of drawing and illustration (not yet painting, still not) I feel how there is much more room for the non-traditional, in a way that I’m not sure writing or literature has many examples of. Maybe it’s to do with how we think of language, what we expect when we open a book, what you can actually do in a book made up of only words.

Sometimes I feel like that I can’t draw, not in the traditional way, not with much skill. When it comes to writing it’s a bit more complex. I studied literature. I read a lot, more in teh past than now, but still. Question: Is the link between looking at paintings and painting per se (I love that expression: per se! So archaic, such chubby cheeks to pinch) the same as reading is to writing? Maybe looking closely at paintings for the past many years has been some kind of groundwork, some kind of permission to play and to tell myself that this might be my style, and then to keep doing it, and by doing it become better at it.

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