Tuesday 24 July 2012

Free writing

The next part of the course is in free writing to loosen the writing muscles and let the words flow like a cliched river from your creative mind. Or some other conceited words like that. anyway freewriting is very
difficult to get my head around and always has been. My free writes often look like a disjointed mess of nearly related words and small bits of different stories normally ending in a longer story at the end. I think that's why free writing is so difficult because its unlike anything your trying to achieve.
What you normally want to achieve is a completed redrafted and reredrafted masterpiece. If you have a look at the inserts to the left you will see the difference. First not that the finished product boasts all the threads being linked to themselves thus completed and all the thread work together to create a whole. The free write on the other hand is literally all over the place. This is why its difficult but then if everything I ever wrote came out of my head looking finished then i would be published by now.

However difficulties aside I did my first bit of research for the Blog today. I looked up the word chakra which amused me enormously because its said that its part of the body but can't be discovered by autopsy. The other first is adding a picture, admittedly it is a rather abstract but simple picture but it still counts. I also found another amusing fact, this program has a spell check and it doesn't recognise the word Blog oh the irony I love it.



Monday 23 July 2012

Is writing like riding a bike?

No riding a bike is physical exercise and writing is mental exercise literally speaking. However I didn't mean the question to be in a literal sense I was referring to it in the way of the much used cliche for something you never forget how to do. But again my answer is no. After almost two years of sitting on my hands and humming tunelessly to avoid things like the OCA and the countless writing competitions that have been and gone I am not finding regular writing easy. Also reading through my old notes and stories I see that what I assumed once was top notch amazing final draft actually looks more like the untidy scrawl in my writers journal. This could be one of two things one I'm finally grown to realise garbage when I see it which means I'm learning to tell the difference between first draft ideas and a finished product and the other is the stuff I'm writing now will look like hammered crap when I read it a year down the line and that all I have is an over inflated ego about the rubbish I'm writing now. I like to think I've learned a thing or two like writing this, I cleverly used an ironic cliche which unless I missed wouldn't be in there at all at the begining. Also throwing american words like garbage in just because i like the word is something that again i would have thought about in case I'm critisized by the English language police, aliens or Spetsnaz special forces operatives. As has been said writing is a dangerous game especially when the English language police, aliens and Spetsnaz special forces are so interested in literature these days. Of course why any of them would be monitering my blog posts who knows, but irrational fears are named that way for a reason.

Basket case

After my recent reinstatement as an OCA student I restarted my course and continued on my writing path. I'm not sure this was an entirely good idea bearing in mind I found out I'm insane. After doing the first exercise of logging a dream into my writers journal i discovered how crazy my life is even when I am asleep. The second part of the exercise was to choose the important phrases and list them and mine looked like this:

Minecraft roller coaster
Bus shed
Fist bump, high five, poke in the eye
Snowy rock outcrops
Jungle desert
Stabbed
Jet ski
Rock pool and water fall
How long is this stair case?

I am a basket case it's official.