One A Day, Day 32: Writer’s Unblock

Look at me, blogging in the middle of the day like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Writing’s a funny thing. If you’re a writer, you’ll know the feeling you get when it’s a “writing day”. I’m sure this is different for everyone, but for me I know it’ll be a good day to write if I find myself composing introductions to articles in my head while I’m doing other things. Because, after all, getting started is always the hardest bit, right?

So now I’ve written the article for which the introduction popped into my head while I was at the shop buying milk. No, you can’t see it. Yet. As introductions go, it wasn’t anything particularly groundbreaking or astounding, but an introduction it was nonetheless, and from that starting point I could continue on to write the rest of the article.

I don’t write like we were taught in school. I remember when we were first taught “how to write an essay”, with encouragements to plan things out beforehand – to plan your introduction, to plan your conclusion, to plan each paragraph using a “point, example, explain” structure (which one English teacher memorably referred to as PEEing all over your work) – and thinking “gosh, that sounds like a lot of unnecessary work”.

By the time I was writing essays for school, I had already been writing for my own pleasure for some years. The box of 5.25″ floppy disks which is currently sitting in my living room accompanied by the Atari 800XL with which they are used contain a couple of disks worth of my “Cyril the Dragon” stories, which were vaguely hallucinogenic tales that only a young child with an overactive imagination could come up with. If I ever get the cable to link the Atari to a PC working, I will be sure to publish some of that juvenilia on this very site for all to admire. To get to the point (maybe I should have planned this paragraph) – these stories were unplanned, written purely by sitting down, starting typing and seeing what happened next. As the product of a young child’s imagination, you can clearly see the influences on the things which took place – mostly video games, some television, some books, some comics, some things which had actually happened – but most importantly, I hadn’t actually planned it that way. It just sort of came out.

Writing in this way is actually quite a relaxing experience. Those who study this sort of thing call it “freewriting”. Technically what I’m doing right now is almost freewriting – the only thing setting it apart from true freewriting is the fact that I’m going back and correcting mistakes. True freewriting is where you sit down with a piece of paper, don’t look at it, don’t listen to anything and just write, without stopping, for a set period of time, then only look at what you’ve written once your time’s up.

Some seriously odd things can come out. For a Creative Writing module that I did as part of my degree, we had to do this every day for about a month. Some days, the beginnings of stories came out. Other days, my internal monologue came out onto the page. Other days, I wrote about how I was feeling, or who I was thinking about, or my aspirations for the future. None of them were great pieces of writing, but they were interesting insights into what was going through my head at the time. I don’t think I still have the pieces of paper on which I wrote them, which is a bit of a shame. Perhaps I’ll try it again sometime, though.

In fact, that sounds like tomorrow’s blog entry is ready to go already. Expect tomorrow’s entry to be even more gibberish than usual, in that case.