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So this writing exercise I'm doing is one that I found in Natalie Goldberg's "Writing Down The Bones" years and years ago, and I've been doing it for a long time. In keeping with her sense of wild mind, the idea is to just write without censoring or stopping for ten minutes. Total stream of consciousness. There's usually a word or an idea that is the object for the exercise, but because you're supposed to just let the words flow, you very often drift quite far afield of the original subject.
These are exercise material, not polished writing. The exercises aren't meant to be important in and of themselves, they're meat to get you acclimated to writing, to let your voice work its way out without the control of your inner censor editing as you go along. Still, it's difficult not to stop and think or to go back and cross out words, especially on a computer. You're expected to make the effort but not be too terribly attached to the results.
I can say from years of experience that this is an excellent way to develop writing as a practice. You won't write a novel this way, but you will get used to the idea of 99% shit and 1% useful work, which is how writing goes. It really helps to do a few in a row. I took a class years ago where we did this for a couple of hours -- write ten minutes, then everybody read their piece, then do it again and again until time ran out. Seeing/reading/hearing other people do it is useful, too. That's why I've tried to do this exercise with my forum friends now and again, but in the end the distance of the Internet works against the intimacy of the exercise. Still, I am happy to work on them by myself.
I am sharing this with you only as part of my desire to push myself to do this. I've committed publicly to playing these games, and nothing makes me do the work like knowing there's someone to read it. I don't think these are aything special. Sometimes you get very lucky and hit a vein of creativity that keeps you going and you wind up with something worth keeping. Other times you are lucky to get a turn of phrase or an idea that you can save up to use another time. Mostly you just get your inner dialogue played out loud, and you realize how hopeless you are.
Comments are off for these posts, but you're welcome to try the exercises yourself, and if you really want to talk to me about them, you can e-mail me.
P.S. I thought about that "posting in real-time" thing but didn't do that today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe not.
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