Sans Fig Leaf
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"Exercising"
12 October, 2006
I was chatting recently with a friend about writing exercises, and things one should do to exercise different portions of one's creativity. He's had some success with "morning pages" where you sit down shortly after waking for the day with a writing implement and some paper and just write whatever comes into your head until you've filled a couple of pages.
I've never really succeeded at stream-of-consciousness writing. I may babble for a few sentences in a random manner, but by the time I've written those two sentences, some idea or theme, or at least a direction will take over. Then it's just a matter of writing the next "logical" sentence.
Which makes it sound a lot more mechanical than it is. It's not that there is always one and only one "next" sentence, but once I get an idea, I'll write like crazy, churning out the sentences and paragraphs almost without thought.
It's that "almost" bit that's hard to describe.
Because sometimes I'll go off on a tangent, which at the time feels like the perfectly natural successor to what I was just talking about, and then I'll get a little ways into it and realize that I'm heading toward a dead-end. I need to either figure out how to loop the tangent back toward the main topic, or I have to just ruthless cut out the unneccesary paragraphs and pick back up in the "correct" direction.
Throughout the process I think about what I'm going to type in a following sentence, paragraph, or page. No matter how I may try, I can't seem turn the planning part off.
I decided to be a writer at a very early age. My family tells of "books" I would write and illustrate myself starting at age four or five. Each book I insisted on reading to anyone I could. By the time I was nine, in addition to writing and drawing my own comic books, I was writing scripts for "shows" that I'd dragoon my cousins and siblings into performing for our adult relatives. Then, when I was ten, my Mom decided to teach me how to type.
Things just became crazy from there--thousands of hours of typing before the age of 16 alone. That means certain neural pathways have gotten a lot of practice at putting one word after another.
That just explains the speed I can put the words down on paper, not necessarily how my brain puts the ideas together to begin with.
The important thing is the practice. Whether we are painting, drawing, composing music, creating dance, or writing a story, at some point we have to jump in and do it. And sometimes what we create will be horrid, othertimes breath-takingly magickal. I've never been able to tell which it would be before I start.
The scary thing is, I seldom know when I finish, either. I may think I only did okay, but then when some readers see it, they tell me it's fabulous. Other times I'll think I really nailed it, but the readers are indifferent. That's okay. Every creative endeavor is a new experiment. Experiments often fail, but so long as we don't allow the failures to stop us from trying again, we'll make progress.
At least, that's the way I do it.
--Scott Adams
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