Writing in Sand

A blue-bottomed tray of sand, a collection of miniature objects and toys, such as the above, and the freedom to play with the abandon of childhood is all that is required to create scenes that release our creative energies and provide insight and inspiration as we go about the challenging business of life. My introduction to sandtray came over a decade ago when my writing group decided to embark on a collaborative writing project. That was the easy part. The question of what to write had as many answers as there were members, seven at that time, and we were at a loss as to which to choose-fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essay, multi-media, or just an anthology of our favorite or best work. One member who is also a sandtray therapist suggested we might solve our dilemma by doing a sandtray together. She answered our blank looks with an absorbing lecture on the history and process of sandtray, which began as play therapy for children who could not articulate traumas and conflicts but were able to describe them in the sandtray in three-dimensional form using a collection of miniature objects and toys that represented all aspects of life. The early researchers, Margaret Lowenfeld, a psychiatrist in London during the 1920's and later Dora Kalff, a student of Carl Jung, discovered that not only were the worlds the children created in the sand revelatory and useful to the therapist, but the act of creating them unleashed the healing ability of the children's psyches much the way their immune systems healed their infections. In other words, just by doing the sandtrays, the children got better.

Gilly suggested that we try an experiment and see if we could find our way out of our dilemma by using the sandtray. We gave a collective YES! and fist pump, or maybe it was just, sure, what have we got to lose. At any rate, at a later date we gathered at Gilly's and she introduced us to her collection of hundreds of miniatures arranged on shelves that begged to be examined and played with. She instructed us each to choose an object that attracted or repelled us, it didn't matter which, and place it in the sand. She had never done a group tray before nor used sandtray for this purpose, so she gave us the caveat that this was an experiment and she, as well as we, didn't quite know what to expect. But we were all game, and we began. We took turns feeling the sand and moving it around and then I believe it was Joan who chose a small airplane. The room was silent as we waited to see what she would do. She held it for a moment then with a sudden move, crashed it nose first into a small mound toward the edge of the tray that could have been a mountain in the sand. I remember a feeling in my gut as shocking as if I had been on that plane. Margaret, one of our poets, said, "Death is upon the land." And with that began the plot that by the end of the day was our novel of a Hollywood actress confronting fifty and mortality, who should have been on that plane to a private and high priced plastic surgery clinic in Brazil, but who substituted her housekeeper at the last moment so Luz could visit her family and OH (Our Heroine) could quietly disappear for a few weeks and find herself. We spent roughly the next year fleshing out the story of what happens to OH when the world learns from the mouth of Brian Williams that our beloved star has perished in the wilds of Brazil, and OH goes underground. The material was rich and fun and inventive, but eventually our members turned to other more personal projects and OH the manuscript went underground, though rumor has it, she is being resurrected and reshaped for possible publication in 2009.

Today our group still talks about what an extraordinary day that was and how remarkable it was that seven writers with diverse interests and stories managed to come together to create something new by simply playing the way we did when we were kids, when months of discussion had yielded nothing. I wonder if our President Elect would consider using the sandtray with his new cabinet!

The sandtray hooked me that day until eventually I decided I had to learn the process from the inside out to use this remarkable vehicle in my work with my own coaching and writing clients. I now combine the two skills into what I call sandtray coaching for want of a better word, because I do not know any other coaches who use this particular formula, which is far more powerful and effective than life coaching alone. Sandtray is largely used as a tool by therapists and occasionally educators. I am hopeful that I can find other life coaches who use the sandtray and we can share our experiences. I use the sandtray in work with people as diverse as golfers and painters.

In this blog I will explore the sandtray as a vehicle for writing exercises. Any writing teacher worth his or her salt introduces students to the discipline of using daily writing exercises to prime the pump. John Gardner has pages of these scenarios that writers can use as prompts to create plots, characters and scenes and to work on various aspects of craft, such as dialogue. For a writer with a functioning imagination, these can be enormously helpful in developing discipline, honing craft and discovering new material. Of course, the imagination will take these suggestions--e.g., create a scene with a woman with a scar on her face, a baby and flat tire on a darkened, deserted road--and go where it wants to, making a comedy, romance or mystery out of it. However, the original image comes from someone else, thereby subtly influencing the piece. Additionally, a writer who is blocked, whose imagination seems to be on permanent pause, is asked to do the thing it cannot do--use the conscious mind to come up with material, and for some writers these exercises simply don’t work. The problem is the roadblock between the source of inspiration and the conscious mind that translates that inspiration into words. This is in itself material for a sandtray session, to discover the nature of the blockage and how one might dissolve it. But working purely on the level of a daily discipline, how different might a writing exercise be, both in effectiveness in allowing the work to progress, and in discovering new work, if the inspiration came from ones own psyche? Using the sandtray as the inspiration for a writing exercise, I will attempt to answer that question. I am familiar with the scenes that easily flare up in my mind like a candle flame when someone else does the hard work of coming up with an idea. Tell me there is a scarred lady with a baby stranded on a deserted road and my creative juices begin to flow. But coming up with that idea on your own when your inner writer has gone on vacation is quite another thing and that is what this blog is about.

Because I am not currently blocked, in the sense that I can create a piece of writing at will, these exercises will not show how a blocked writer might sidestep a so-called writing block and create from a sandtray image. I am hopeful, though, that they will demonstrate a unique approach to writing, one that can access the creative source directly. I know that this approach has limited application; few if any writers have the sandtray apparatus at their disposal. On the other hand, they might seek out a professional such as me, to use the sandtray to jar loose those stubborn stories.

So, now, instead of using prompts from the outside, I will create a sandtray several times a week and use it to write a piece of fiction. I am interested in showing the process of imagination and creativity and how the sandtray can bring them together in a written form. The writing portion of the session may be just a page, a beginning, or a fleshing out of an idea. I am concerned with process and content here, not craft. I am interested in demonstrating the potential of sandtray work for writers and other artists. My first tray follows and I call the piece, Crystal Mountain.









This sandtray began with the creation of the hill or mountain in the center of the try and I carved out a river or possibly lake on either side of the hill. I then searched the collection and put the crystal object on top and surrounded it with dark polished stones. It did not particularly speak to me so I decided it need human figures. The tray flowed after that, with three explorer/archeologist looking figures on the right, a crouching man with a rifle in the lower left corner, various trees, wise men and a brass or gold llama in the upper left corner, a canoe, a wishing well and gold objects, some of which are also buried in the mountain, a skull box and hidden in the trees is a naked woman washing herself by the river and a baby nearby. There is also a crashed plane near the canoe that is hard to see in the photo. A line of turtles lead from shore to shore on the right and a line of crabs below them, as well as a school of gold and silver fish in the river. A canon is in the lower right corner. A large jeweled butterfly is behind the trees and the woman is bathing with a baby playing nearby. I pondered this for quite a while before any story came to me. This is piece I began:

The scene below him made no sense. Charlie checked the map to see what he had missed, but he knew the charts by heart. No map, no log, no diary had ever mentioned a village in these scrubby hills, and he had studied everything known about Crystal Mountain, but he couldn’t deny the ramshackle huts scattered along the shore. There wasn’t even supposed to be water for another three miles and here was a river meandering 200 yards below their feet, turtles shimmering silvery in the late afternoon sun as they swam in close formation along the shore like a military honor guard. A grove of trees oversaw the bend in the river. He didn’t recognize the species, all leaves and no limbs. The lush foliage swayed lazily in the soft breeze like sea grass turning this way and that in an underwater current. A mantle of clouds shrouded the top of the mountain across the river, the peak too high even for this massive cordillera. Everything about the scene was wrong.

Bettina brushed past Tom and grabbed Charlie’s map. “Where the hell are we? You didn’t tell us about this place.”

Bettina had that edge in her voice again. Any disruption in plans set her on edge and she flashed her irritated scowl as she tossed her head toward the collection of small huts across the river as if to say, how the hell did these get here. Ever since she had put up the money for this expedition to find the site of the ancient Peruvian burial grounds, Charlie had known the price of fulfilling his life’s dream was to subject himself to Bettina’s irrational moods.  

“I’m as confounded as you are, Bettina. There has never been a report of modern life in these mountains. The place looks abandoned from here."

“Not so,” announced Tom, handing Bettina his field glasses. “I think I see some movement in those trees. Looks like a woman. And I think there’s a baby crawling around at her feet.”

Bettina snatched the glasses from Tom's hand and stomped a few feet ahead before taking a look.  Something sparkled at the base of the trees and then flew upwards, jolting her and she leaped backwards.  The largest butterfly she had ever seen, as large as a hawk and iridescent as a peacock, glided across the river towards them.  It seemed to own the sky and was about to demand to know who they were and what business they had trespassing on this Eden.


Commentary on tray and story:

At first I regarded this as the setting for a trite Indiana Jones genre tale, outsiders discovering a lost civilization with buried treasure and danger abounding, a love triangle between the two men and the woman. It was fun to contemplate the plot, but it didn’t interest me as a writing project. Too derivative of Hollywood action movies, not enough psychological drama. I felt ultimately dissatisfied with it as a writing exercise.

Several days later I did a second tray which I will describe in my next post.