Free-writing
A fellow blogger and friend of mine recently finished NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month, where tons of people commit themselves to write 50,000 words between the first and the last day of November. My friend Jaclyn Paul (check out her blog if you like creative people, she's very much so) crossed the finish line on day 30 at 50,020 words. I was deeply impressed, so I asked her how she managed. She said she would sit down for about 1,000 words on weekdays and catch up on the weekends. But she would also set aside time to do stream of consciousness-style free-writing, about 15 minutes every day. I said I had tried that before, but it just felt icky. She said she stopped using the margins, forced herself to write sloppy, and just let things fall out. And somehow that made it easier to write more. Both of us recalled Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg's book about writing, where she calls on writers to simply "fill notebooks," focus on quantity instead of quality, and trust that a novel will emerge out of the chaos.
Doesn't really seem like the best way to write a novel, does it? But strangely enough, she's right. You don't try to edit as you go, or else you'll undercut the natural flow of the novel. The words might not all be right the first time, but that's for your editor to figure out. Your editor might be you, but you can't be both writer and editor at the same time.
Since I'm between jobs, I've been focusing on improving myself as much as possible. One of the things I've let fallow for too long is my writing, so I decided to start doing regular free-writes. I just finished my first in a very, very long time. If you're wondering what this looks like, here's a short excerpt as an example:
Stretch your mind. Don't just asborb [sic] information and grow fat. Spit it back out again. Regurgitate it. Build smething [sic] with it. You can't see a shape until you walk around it, tear it, turn it, break it, burn it, to really know it. You have to be willing to suffer with it, to go to war with it, be tortured with it, love it, have its babies, and roll over every corner of it before you know it.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but that's not really the point. In fact, this probably has far too much structure for a free-write. It's not particularly meaningful, either, but that is also not the point. The point is, as my brain latched onto at some point in those fifteen minutes, to stretch your mind. In the same way a runner does several meaningless athletic acts before getting to the real business of running, like touching his toes, or pulling her feet up, or jumping in place, so too does a writer have to write many meaningless things before getting to the real business of writing. It's my hope that doing free-writing exercises regularly will help my unconscious grow nimble and flexible, so when I sit down to write, my writer muscle is already warmed up and loose.
The brain is like any other muscle, and it grows lax without exercise. You can benefit from free-writing even if you're just writing a corporate memo or a Facebook message to an old friend. It's all about training your unconscious so that when the pen is in your hand or your hands are on the keyboard, everything falls into place.
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