Wednesday’s Word Compost

For today’s word-compost (free-writing), let’s get sensual–with a twist.

Today’s direction: Write the details of your immediate surroundings without using any visual references.

 

Remember, the purpose of word-composting is to shove aside the editor and let the creative part of the brain have free play.  Here’s a review of the guidelines:

1. Keep pencil/pen/fingers-on-the-keyboard moving

2. Don’t worry about grammar, punctuation, sentence structure

3. If you get stuck, repeat the last word or phrase as many times as you have to until more words come.

Ten minutes to delve into four oft-neglected senses.  Go!

 

Here’s what I managed, seated in my favorite local cafe:

The low lazy voice of the indie artist over the stereo. The hum of the refrigerator cases, the growl of the industrial coffee brewer, brewing industrial amounts of house blend.  The undifferentiated rumble of conversation breaking for a differentiated snippet: house… Elvis… apparently… yeah… Americano…  

The clink of spoon against ceramic, glass stacked into glass.  Warmth, stirred by ceiling fans, swath of cool when the side door yawns.  Clack of boot heels across the worn wooden floor.  Papers fold and unfold crisp news articles.  The shriek of the milk steamer settles into a mutter.  It has to work so hard at the beginning to find its stride.  

The smell of coffee is lost in long acclimation.  I know it’s there, but I can’t smell it.  The wash of baked muffins, panninis, breads, lays down a base coat of fragrance.  

Earl Grey steeping, its bergamot signature scrawled around my face for the first scalding sip.  Soy milk lending it substance.  Soft mutter of dozens of fingers putting keyboards through their paces.  Everyone has a deadline.

 

Okay, go ahead and reread what you’ve written, observing without judgment (I know I sound like a yoga teacher here).

At this location, in this particular moment, I notice that I’m connecting most with sound.  If I’d tried this exercise a few months ago (at the beginning of my pregnancy, incidentally), it would have been smell.  Most of my first trimester, I was assaulted by smells, a common symptom that often is the cause of nausea in early pregnancy.  Today, I’m tuned into sound.

What sense are you plugged into today?

Free-Writing Wednesday (aka Word-Composting)

Free-writing is wonderful in its simplicity.

I first learned of it in college when my TA turned me on to Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life.  The purpose of free-writing is to let loose our limitless creativity, which we keep buried under our routine ways of thinking and which is often at the mercy of our internal critics.  In the book, Goldberg calls this internal critic/editor the “monkey mind” (which doesn’t exactly work for me as a metaphor because monkeys can get pretty wild in their play).

The guidelines go like this (notice that I didn’t say “rules”):

1. Set yourself either a time (five minutes to start) or space limit (half a page to start) and KEEP THE PEN/PENCIL MOVING until you reach it.

2. Yes, really: KEEP THE PEN/PENCIL MOVING.  Write upside-down or in circles if you want, just keep it going.

3. Don’t erase or cross out.

4. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, etc.

5. Be fearless.  Don’t shy away from anything.  Dumb, dangerous, dry, disgusting–it all goes into the compost heap.

That’s right: banish the inner editor completely.  If you get stuck, write the last word that came out again and again until you get back in the flow.

Most orthodox folk (yes, I’m well aware of the irony here), insist on writing utensils and paper, but this also works on a keyboard.  If you want to test it out on your computer, check out Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die site; it has a “Kamikaze Mode” that starts erasing words if you break guideline #1.  If you opt for the download version, there’s a “Disable Backspace” setting that makes sure you follow guideline #3.

Free-writing is fabulous for brainstorming and is a great way to warm up before sitting down to more (ahem) serious writing.  In fact, those of you who have come in contact with The Artist’s Way, might recognize the technique from “morning pages”, which works in a similar way: you write out all the first layer debris that scums up the surface of your mind, so that you can start working deeper into the imagination.

Your non-fiction writing can benefit from this as well.  I’ve used this successfully with essay topics, where it has helped me find a direction for a certain topic as well as flesh out my ideas.  The first five minutes of an essay test has me on a piece of scratch paper, spilling out whatever comes to mind in an effort to get past the obvious.

For fiction writing, the possibilities are endless.  Stuck on a character?  Free-write from his/her POV.  Can’t think of a way to describe a basic setting to make it come alive?  Free-write every last detail of that cafe down to the dead ragged moth coated in window-sill dust.  Having trouble with an action scene?  Free-write every physics-defying possibility.

Okay, try it.  Set a timer for five minutes.  Here’s a prompt to get you started:

“I remember…”

Again, if you get stuck, rewrite the last word you wrote or go back to the prompt:

I remember I remember I remember the ugly brown goat at the petting zoo.  It lunged at my peanut bag, tore it open in one snap.  Peanuts tumbled across the tray of my stroller, but before my hands could catch them, the intruding grey goat snout lipped them all up.  I remember that I screamed, anger, frustration.  I was saving those peanuts for the cute black baby goat over there.  Not this fat farting leviathan of a goat.  My mother hustled me away. I think she interpreted my howling as fear.  Nope.  All year and a half of me wanted to strangle that foul bug-eyed beast.

Time’s up.  Shake out your hand.  Read it over.  Anything interesting or unexpected?  Now, now, stuff that hyper-critic back in the box and nail it shut.  Just notice what you wrote without getting judgmental.

I was struck by how violent my reaction to the goat was.  I remember wanting to really hurt that animal, and that was before I had the language to articulate that kind of violence.

How did it go for you?