Day 26: Real Life "Prompts"

When was the last time a "writing prompt" inspired you enough to follow its lead?

For a majority of writers, that would be never. Despite the ubiquitous prompts offered on many writing websites, in writing magazines and even some writing classes, these ideas often fail to excite the imagination of anyone else except the one who creates them.

The only time that prompts may prove effective is when a prize lures us into entering a contest. (Contests are on the list of "items to be covered" in future posts.) Otherwise, so many writers that I know or have overheard believe that this is another area that requires a skill they don't have.

One problem with following the lead of others is that we often forget to double back and gauge how advice or prompts may have silenced our natural gift of story telling.

So in the spirit of our ancestors who felt the need to tell stories without the desire to "publish," I propose pausing long enough right now to open a window and look out. Don't think, just feel, or listen, or smell, and allow the first impressions to steep.

At lunch, listen without judging the snippets of conversations around you. Look through your photos, to see the lighting and what mood they evoke now.

If you stop every now and then as you go through your days, ideas just happen.  We can follow, and create new plots and characters by paying attention to what we collect along the way and the responses of animals, vegetables and minerals to attention or neglect. Everything counts.

You might find that once you start putting all these pieces together, the ideas will be endless.

  

Day 25: Sing it into Being

If your first reaction to this post title is a groan, a giggle or a retching noise, then take a deep breath before reading on.

Think, instead, about the rhythms that are inherent in words and the melodic counterpoints woven through the greatest writing, artworks and even some online comments.

Because we are on our own, brainstorming sessions often take the shape of berating ourselves for a lack of brilliance or a forced "mind-mapping" that is too far away from an organic play of words and ideas.

Instead of digging in to come up with another mind map that takes you nowhere, try fleshing out an idea by rapping or singing it out loud. Or try listening to music that fits the scene you are writing, then type or write a description of the feelings it evokes or a weeping willow encased in fog that blocks your way.  

Day 24: Know Your Limits -- Then Push Past Them

In a 2009 Wired editorial on "Design Under Constraint," creative director Scott Dadich talks about the limits inherent in filling a magazine page with anything other than text and designs. It's still not economically feasible to add video or sound to a printed page, but what Dadich understands is that every page offers the opportunity to overcome its apparent limits. (http://www.wired.com/culture/ design/magazine/17-03/dp_intro)

As writers, we push past the limits of a page every day to build our writing practice. In fact, we only limit ourselves by adopting restrictive ideas about inherent abilities, judging whether our writing is "good or bad" and by seeking a critical view of our writing when we are too vulnerable. Unfortunately, seeking criticism too soon can reinforce a false sense of inferiority.

Limits and goals can fence us in only if we allow them to build a brick wall around our imaginations. As a writer, it's possible to tear out the bricks, but it takes less time if you start with a picket fence that you can squeeze through.

One way to get beyond false restrictions is by writing in a genre or style that you despise or fear-- because some teacher or mentor in your past told you not "to go there." Try a page of science fiction, a limerick or a romantic scene. I know many of you flinched at the last one, but going beyond the limits of your prejudices can help you find a character's voice or put a false limit behind you.

Day 23: Sentenced to Write

To take the step from words to sentences requires more than a comma to signal a pause or a period to end an idea. It takes a certain courage to pen or type a stretch of letters that may take forever to craft on days when we cannot accept the inevitability of the climb we face to reach the next level.

We only have to commit (every pun intended) to take some pleasure from this process. Playing with words means taking the time to map the journey. In connecting the dots of words to sentences, without worrying about the perfection of either, writers write.

Although short, this post recognizes the need we have as writers to communicate in the best way we know how. Face it, it has been a long time since many of us have considered the basic building blocks of writing. We take for granted this ability to leap from words to sentences. So pause for a few minutes just to acknowledge how you became a writer through an appreciation of its finer points.

Day 22: Word Bites

Following up on the Day 21 post on language, I want to note how many people, including Mark Twain (apparently) believe in a magical "perfect" word or words.

Take the Twain quote: "To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself..."


Although it's laudatory to encourage writers to edit their works, every sentence begins with the words you use every day. There's no "secret" to writing or the process. In fact, it's simplicity itself. 


Just like learning to walk, we start out slowly and gain more confidence as we build to a run and then learn to slow down again in order to take in the words and world around us. At a point that we can't control or design, our own writing becomes criticism-proof. 


This can only happen if we take our time finding the words that are right for us, the rhythms that sing to us and the stories that are written word by word by us because of the sheer pleasure of creation. 

Day 21: The Language Beat

If you write based on the rhythms inherent in the language you speak, dream or learned as a second or third means to communicate, you understand how I feel about words and the way they shape us.

Lera Borodistky tells the story of a 5-year-old girl who can point north without thinking it through, while academics across the world cannot do the same. In her 2011 Scientific American article, at http://psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-am-2011.pdf, Ms. Borodistky notes that this girl's facility for finding true north lies in the language she uses and how it relates to space and time.

"Studies have shown that changing how people talk changes how they think. Teaching people new color words, for instance, changes their ability to discriminate colors. And teaching people a new way of talking about time gives them a new way of thinking about it."

Languages with their shapes, such as Japanese and Chinese writing, their accents and, as with English, a confusing multiplicity of meanings, provide more than enough ways to communicate. But on the page, most words are just chicken scratch without a writer making them mean something more.

Early language development depended on our ancestors turning their oral stories and their wisdom into a visual, understandable, representation: a written language.  But consider the quote above about how changing the way people talk changes the way they think.

As writers, we have this power. We take four-dimensional ideas and create third dimensional images that take root in a person's imagination. It's something we can only guide, not control. Yet, it's the beat that goes on in our unique form of language as art.

Day 20: Kick the Goals -- Embrace the Writing

Given the opportunity to write, do you take it? Or, have you listened to so much advice on goals and a requisite number of pages that you have to check your day-planner first?

In other words, do you see writing as a treat or a tricky manifestation of hostile forces? Also, when was the last time you laughed out loud from the high that writing gives when it's focused?

If the last time you laughed hard enough to make you sick happened at age 3, it's time to embrace the writer that started growing at that moment. It's also way past time to kick every goal to the curb and drive over them.

Creativity comes from unexpected observations. In writing down those "aha" moments without needing to structure them in a "logical" way, we make them ours.

If you are stuck, try writing in the voice of your childhood self. Give your adult self the permission to write when the spirit strikes hope into you, and tune out the fear that holds you back.