INTRODUCTION
The next ten*** questions or prompts I'll be posting over the next few months as part of this WRITING WORKSHOP are intended to spark your FREE WRITING creativity.
WHAT IS FREE-WRITING? Usually this term refers to the FREEDOM to WRITE spontaneously and with the editor shut off in your head. I believe in this process.
You use your pen - preferable one that flows easily with ink - though I know some of you have never even learned to write cursively or are used to typing on a keyboard or computer. Whatever is comfortable to you. But here's the thing about using a flowing pen. It's best if you barely lift it off the paper. Just keep going and flowing with the ink.
The proofreader in you is in the distant future. So is the analysis that goes on in your head that questions every word as you tend to do when writing papers in college. It is not genre specific. The results don't have to be useful. You can get off topic. It's OK if you "go against" the assignment. You don't have to keep your work though I think it's a good idea to read it over or put it away for three months and then read it over again. You may reread it then and think it was a nice experience but pitch it or decide you're a genius after all!
When I ran a WRITERS ROUND TABLE years ago - before I went to college and studied creative writing - all our exercises were free-writing ones and that turned out to be mostly fun, though sometimes writers ventured into dark areas too. In groups you must have comfort and be nonjudgmental. You are not concerned about rules, results, where it's going, a grade, or how to please your professor - or me.
If you are new to this you may want to use an egg timer or stop watch or cell phone timer. Start with 9 minutes, go to 15, eventually you may be able to free write for hours. I know I can. And as a result YOU WILL NOT EXPERIENCE BLOCK because you will learn that you can truly write about ANYTHING ANYWHERE. (One ex student of mine told me he wrote while laid up with a broken body after an accident. He turned it into a screenplay and sold it.) Ultimately, once you are IN FLOW - a state you will experience as different than ordinary life - longer periods of writing time are not only entirely possible but inevitable.
I'm self taught in flow. I know it came through first being an artist/painter/designer and all those hours I focused on canvas or paper and forgot where I was or what time it was. Sometimes I think I experience the present as well as the past or future when I work. Since I wasn't taught how to in a classroom, I know you can teach yourself too.
Author Stephen King says that writing is HYPNOSIS and having experienced HYPNOSIS I agree. In FLOW your brain is definitely functioning differently. Flow happens in all the arts - music (I'm one to think that back in the day Led Zeppelin was in flow in concert.) - painting - crocheting - it seems to me to be tied into the use of the body, particularly the hands but also DANCE. I suspect that using your LEFT HAND may increase your RIGHT BRAIN abilities. One thing that happens to me when I'm crocheting is that my thoughts are operating on more than one level at a time; I'm paying attention to what my hands are creating, but sometimes memories bubble up or I have intuitions or some mundane ideas.
Avoid interruptions such as cell phone calls and notifications. Find a lovely spot, a distant corner in the library, or a circle of friends. You can share - or not.
If you go through a time of your life in which you are too busy, physically tired, fighting illness, working two jobs, tearing around with the children, this can effect flow. Never the less, once you've learned how to reactivating the state will be easier to get back into after some time away.
At various book signings and readings and classes I've attended, students often ask the writer about their habits to get a book done. I've heard every sort of advice, including regular schedules, talking the work aloud while showering, writing while the children sleep, and writing so many words - a page or word count - every day, which sounds like labor to me. But whatever time you have to write is enhanced by FLOW.
Christine Trzyna
C 2018-2021 Christine Trzyna
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*** More exercises have been posted.
