Don't Think, Just Write.

I began my writing course on the 18th April, & am now about 6 weeks into the course. From the very first lesson I knew I had made a good choice by enrolling. Inspiration is gradually beginning to flow through the use of our tutor's techniques & guidance. The biggest thing that we do that is of huge help, is Free Writing. No thinking, just putting pen to paper & writing whatever comes to our minds. She recommends to time yourself for 10 - 20 minutes & in that time you must not stop, no thinking, no editing, no reading back over your work, no crossing things out. 

It's so simple but is very effective, once you look back through what you have written sometimes it isn't particularly gripping, but there are sentences that stick out that I then highlight to use again somewhere within my novel. One of the occasions involved our tutor giving us an event & character, & we had to free write for 10 minutes based on what we had been given. I got Margaret Thatcher's funeral as an event, & a Morris Dancer as a character. This was challenging I must admit, trying to find a connection between these without being able to actually think it through, as I had to to simply begin writing from off the top of my head. What I came out with wasn't half bad though! 

"Get it written, then get it right."

This past week's lesson we worked on free writing with fairy tales. First we had to use our non dominant hand & draw a picture of whatever fairy tale we first thought of. Mine was Cinderella. Once we had drawn our image of the story she told us based on what we have drawn we were to give the story a title off the top of our head that is not the original. Nothing really sprang to mind so I just wrote The Perfect Princess. We then had to free write for 10 minutes based on the title we had chosen - not the story itself. 

This was brilliant, although I didn't differ too much from the original outlay of the story I wrote from a different perspective - The Prince's. Which incidentally is now our homework. To free write our own fairytale based on a different character's viewpoint.  

Each lesson a quote or two are written up on the board by famous authors, from their knowledge & experience as writers. It's comforting to know that as a beginner they have all had similar problems to us where inspiration is concerned. The most popular thing said though is that Fear is the main cause of bad writing. The gremlin that sits on your shoulder telling you that you aren't good enough, is the reason so many people shy away from writing what they really feel & do not write to their full potential. You need to encourage yourself to just let go of those fears & write whatever comes out of you. Hence the free writing, if you don;t stop, edit, think about what you're writing, you can't convince yourself that it isn't good enough & cross it out. 

"The first draft of everything's shit." - Ernest Hemingway