I wrote 1,211 words earlier today in the form of my typical daily free-writing exercise. I write stream of consciousness for a period of five minutes, timed by a “Meditation Timer” widget I downloaded from the somewhere in a Macintosh corner of the Internet. Then I stop and read what I’ve written, look for a “center of gravity,” and write for another five minutes. Then I read again and write again. At the end, I categorize the piece by date, form, and subject matter. Today’s free-writing exercise included text on the topics of irritability, frustration, money, noise, distractions, Baby Boomers, and “running around the world and playing” (among others).
After I categorize the exercise, I copy it into my writing Wiki, where I’ve collected and categorized 356 articles of one sort or another. Some day I will figure out what to do with all those words. Or not.
The free-writing exercises don’t produce material that I’m likely to mine for content to use anywhere else. For the most part, they’re rants, whines, whimpers, or bits of self-pitying or self-aggrandizing nonsense. But they serve the purpose of draining some of the crazy out of my system before I try to write anything more purposeful. Maybe they serve some other function as well. I’m not sure.
During the 50/50 class, I often used this structured free-writing practice as a way to warm up and to start playing with ideas for the class assignments. That didn’t seem to work today, for some reason. I received the assignment around 2:00 in the afternoon, but it took me a couple of hours to get myself situated in front of the laptop and ready to write, and then the stream of my consciousness wanted to go in several directions completely unrelated to the class prompts. After I’d finished the warm-up, I took a stab at the “canoe” prompt. It’s a shadow of a story idea that’s been lurking in the back of my imagination for years and years. I don’t know what’s going to happen yet. There are two young men who seem too good to be true, and the narrator is profoundly jealous of them (and intensely attracted to one), and then something terrible happens.
But after banging out a few paragraphs of that story, I was stuck. I played around for a while with several false starts on the other two suggestions, but was getting nowhere, so I took off for a walk at the park.
Walked 6-1/2 miles, and as I was finishing the last stretch, my boyfriend drove by in his truck and gave a honk. He found a parking space and met me near the end of my route to see if I wanted to go for some dinner. I was famished and welcomed the excuse to put off the rest of my 1,000 words just a little longer.
After dinner, I came home and got back to work. I kept running into more false starts, so finally I decided to take this approach: just write something. Write about what worked today and what didn’t. Write about my writing practice. Write about how eager I am to make something good happen with this Boot Camp. So there you have it.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
Great discription of how thinking and writing are two different things. I go from idea to idea and when I finally decide to write it’s usually something completely different. And I grab any opportunity to put off facing the lap top. I’ve never tried a free writing exercise. I may give it a go.
I hear that you got stuck on the “Golden Boys”. But I bet it is one of those stories that you have no idea where it is going to go until you write it. I’ve heard writers talk about the character coming out onto the page in a completely different way than they expected, or even planned for. Maybe it will be the same with this story.
Barbara,
My suggestion as a starting point for a free-writing exercise is to set a timer for five minutes, then just write or type as quickly as you can, even if you have to resort to profanity, ranting, gibberish, whatever. (Chris Welsh of Mastery of Learning introduced me to a form of this exercise.)
There’s a therapeutic effect, and sometimes you might be surprised by what tumbles out onto the page.