For the last week, Ive been trying to practice 15 minutes of high-speed writing on a daily basis. My brain was very resistant to just writing at a high speed with low standards and expected it to be super painful, but I managed to get it to do successfully by telling my brain that the form of the writing exercise was to spend at least 1000 characters describing a place, followed by at least 1000 characters describing a person inside the place, which works out to around 15 minutes for me. Ive been meaning to get around to some form of fast writing practice for a really long time. Years. But I could never think of a suggested kata that my brain wasnt screaming much too loudly about to actually do. Thanks to Brienne for talking me through this one. It will surprise absolutely no one reading this (given that I posted it to FB at all; I do need to post more of my mistakes and failures) that the 15 minutes of daily fast-writing is working great. Its already shown me some of what my mind does too much of when its trying to run on automatic, and Ive already started trying variants of fast-writing beyond the place and person kata. One important variant was trying to write 2000 characters worth of 1-3 sentence plot descriptions. I called the page mundane plots in hopes that my brain would hold itself to low standards and voluntarily generate something about a man and his dog. Needless to say my brain absolutely refused to do this and none of the plots are mundane, but for things where I made my brain write sentences without being allowed to pause much, theyre surprisingly not-terrible. Anyway, today, after just a week of doing this sort of thing, my high-speed practice spontaneously output a 200-word story! Not, you know, the worlds greatest story, but the point is that writing one sentence after another without slowing down or advance planning produced an okay story so I am like YAY! Here it is with surprisingly minimal editing: **** A falling star twinkles in the twilight. Then another. Then another. The man who pressed the button is wailing, weeping, hammering on the button repeatedly (this doesnt help), whacking the side of the machine and inspecting it for levers, wires, anything to stop the stars from falling. Beside him is his Watcher, reading a book. She was very excited the first time this happened. She yelled at him, screamed at him, explained exactly what hed done wrong in horrific detail. Now the stars are falling and the Watcher is reading a romance novel (that would be the polite term). She told him, in a sighing sort of way, that maybe he shouldnt take directions from a mysterious hooded figure who knew him by name before he ever introduced himself. She said (he didnt listen) that maybe he ought to have turned back after the *first* seer prophesying doom. She told him explicitly not to push the button, but she said it in the dull, dead voice of a Watcher who has already seen her ward destroy the last dozen worlds on account of not listening to her. There are some people that are absolutely not cut out to save the universe. Next time shes not taking this job unless shes allowed to eat the stupid ones.
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 01:36:30 +0000
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