When I was in high school, I had a Lit teacher who promoted free-writing. We were to bring a composition book with us to class and spend the first ten minutes or so of class writing down anything that came to mind… with no attention to punctuation or capitalization… just write whatever was on your mind. I found this freeing and meditative. The teacher wouldn’t read it, and only checked that we’d done the writing and so it was peaceful and productive.
Randie and Ryan
Tripping through married life…
Despite being a writer, I have only rarely engaged in free-writing. Instead, I guess I thrive in free-telling, or “walking in the wilds of my mind’s eye” as I refer to it. I build stories in my head, experiencing them as the protagonist, or an onlooker, or simply as the background. It unfolds seemingly without my direction or contribution, arranging and retelling itself as this new reality coalesces.
I like your exercise, Pete. It would be fun to do that with the Squid Gang. They all attend the same gallery show… and Mouse thinks the work is inane. Grace sees the morbid aspects of the show. Ryan sees the contrasts and human commentary, Randie sees the color relationships… etc.
Hadda dodge that in high school—I wound up writing out semi-poetic passages from the SF books I was reading. A couple of quotes from a C. M. Kornbluth story raised a few eyebrows, though.
RN… but that would be within the exercise… whatever floats into your head… you write it down and that will often lead to lines of thinking and revelation, whatever that maybe. It’s more for you than for anyone else.
No, they specified it was supposed to be your own thoughts. But I was thinking them when I wrote them out by hand.
I often have song lyrics in my head. But it’s in MY head! If that’s what’s in there…
“Drain” will give you a smirk, but try image google-ing “boring oregon city”.
Yep, it’s really a sign.
Hahahahahahah!
I generally avoided free writing because I rarely have only one train of thought going on in my head, and trying to write one or another out just jumbles up the whole thing after a few sentences. Because of the way I tended to skip thoughts mid sentence the few times my teachers insisted I do this, I almost got taken out of school for mental issues. they thought I might be schizoid, as opposed to just very easily distracted and paying no attention to what I was actually doing!
REeeeally… wow, that’s interesting. I would think that the forced channeling would have helped. But all brains are not created equal… sometimes, the establishment treats people like they should be…. and they just aren’t.