Write Like a Slime Mold

Feel your way forward through the maze

From what I understand of slime molds, which is not as much as slime-moldologists but more than some people, they can work their way through a maze. Like us, they can solve problems. And they have to. They have to make decisions about how to move forward, which way to go, in which direction to grow (for to go is to grow for a slime mold—and isn’t it also true for our writing, and for our lives, aren’t we always growing our work in a certain direction as we push each line forward, and don’t we also grow in this process?).

I’ve been thinking about this, and thinking about the mazes that slime molds can work their way through. And I’ve been thinking that everything we write is a maze of sorts. Not that there’s a given way to go through a piece of writing, a preordained natural structure with one correct way to move from beginning to end. Not that, but that every move forward brings us to a new juncture, a new decision about which way to go next. The maze would be different for any two writers. The end of a line or a section or stanza or chapter is a juncture, a turn in the maze. (And in a way, we are always lost until a piece or poem or book is finished, until we’ve worked the maze in the way that feels right to us.) The end of a sentence presents us with a new decision to make: which way now? From this place, you could go in one direction or a million others. Anything could happen. The paths of the maze we must travel—which is also us creating the path—are endless.

You know when you’re making your way jauntily through the writing of something and you reach one of these junctures, and then you just … sit there, hopeless and blank-eyed and confused and overwhelmed and despondent? You know when you don’t know which way to go? You know when you don’t know for a day and then a week and then a month?

Here’s what I learned about slime molds that caught my attention. The slime-moldologists who study them have observed that sometimes a slime mold will just sit there doing nothing. At least, that’s how it appears. “And then boom!—” says one slime-moldologist describing the process, it suddenly grows forward. In the particular case of the described study, it grows forward toward the object with the greatest density (not food, just a piece of glass); “it prefers the heavier mass,” the scientist in the study said.

So what is a slime mold doing when it’s just sitting there, when nothing seems to be happening?

“It’s sensing strain in the medium. It’s pulling, and it feels the vibrations that come back. It’s ridiculously sensitive. … During those four hours it collects the data, decides where it’s going, and then, boom!”

So, can you see how you also must write like a slime mold? And how sometimes that looks like doing nothing? How sometimes four hours or four days will pass and nothing appears to be happening? Can you trust that you, too, might work your way through a problem as a slime mold does? Sensing strain in the medium, pulling, feeling vibrations. Which way do you want to go?

I think sometimes we must sit there and do nothing, stare and stare at the juncture we’ve come to.¹ Sometimes this doing-nothing will happen at the desk. Sometimes it might also look like doing something, like writing ourselves into a dead end and then having to turn around and find the way out from there. Sometimes it might look like doing something else, like taking a shower or going on a long walk or to yoga class or to sleep. It may look like reading someone else’s work, washing the dishes, taking out the trash, making an appointment, or sweeping a corner.

However the doing-nothing looks, if we can release frustration and know that something is happening with us, that we are “ridiculously sensitive,” and that to go forward is to grow, we will have more peace with the process, as slime molds clearly do.

I suggest finding your way back into the maze—looking at the piece and where you are in it, how you got there—even when you don’t know the way forward. I think about the way a slime mold prefers whatever has greatest density, and what that density might be for any given piece of writing. Can you begin to feel its vibrations and how you might move toward it? Can you feel its weight?

Sometimes, thanks to slime-moldologists, the reward for a slime mold at the end of a maze is food. In a natural condition, something to eat would also be the slime mold’s destination. And so I am also thinking of how what I want to reach at the end of the maze of whatever I’m writing is a feeling of satiation. That I have moved toward that greatest density, the thing I wanted most to express, that I have gone through the maze, sensing the strain and feeling the vibrations, and found the ending. It’s a feeling that I made the right turns, and that the ending hits the spot. A feeling that I can feast upon my own work now and call it good, and that I have grown in the process.

If you’re stuck, go on now, sit there and do nothing.

1. One reason, perhaps, that I love writing and talking about the writing process, is that it so beautifully mirrors this creative act of making a life.