Shaun Levin

Posts Tagged ‘art’

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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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Inside a Book

In Writing on September 23, 2020 at 8:17 pm

I met a man many years ago who gave up on writing. At the time, I’d known him for 4 or 5 years and had seen him try to write and succeed in writing and complete a novel. When he gave up he had been writing for many years but with limited success and an overall sense that he was neither enjoying the process nor able to achieve the kind of work he was striving for.

This was many years ago, maybe 15, and I remember being both astonished and awed by his decision, his announcement that he’d no longer be a writer. The struggle was over. He may have said that he wasn’t sure what he would do instead but that he did know that he would never write again. I might be exaggerating about the last bit. I have no idea where he is now nor whether he ever returned to writing. To be honest, I don’t remember his name (although we do have a mutual friend), but I do remember the moment when he said what he said in that large room in Soho at that dining table with the London light coming in through the windows, muted by the general grey of the city. I remember the relief in his voice, in his face: at last he was free from some burden that had clung to him for too long.

Astonished the one could just give up.

I have not always been loyal to writing but then writing has not always met my needs. For many years I relied on writing to fulfill my needs. Maybe we were co-dependent, maybe I asked for too much, maybe writing asked for too little in return. And so I drifted away for a while and found myself doing other things. I played with other art forms – photography, illustration, bookbinding – and because they were not “my” art forms and I was an amateur, there was no pressure, no bar, no history. All there was was now and the joy of the experiment. There was what there was in the beginning of my writing life: only the writing. No expectation, no assumption of an observing eye, a reader. Everything I did was for the writing itself.

And suddenly, colour mattered, colour was available. Composition on a single page mattered. It was possible to put a small image on a large page. Each page was a canvas, is canvas. Take a photograph and put it on a page and it’s possible for the page to be done, complete. You don’t have to fill it with words, the most difficult, demanding, and exacting of mediums.

I think what I’m exploring here is the question of what constitutes a book? Or: What are the options available to us when we’re faced with a blank page, even a single page? And: At what point are words not enough? At what point is the use of words too much? And when they’re too much or not enough, what are the options available to a writer? What are the other performances you can do in a book? What can you do inside a book that will excite you to keep making work?