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Yes, it's Valentine's Day, but it's also the mid-point of the month, so I thought I would take a moment to talk briefly about the "Month Of Writing" -- how it has gone so far and what's next.
For those of you just tuning in, instead of the usual collection of links and so on that I customarily post here, I decided to spend the entire month of February working on writing exercises and posting them here as a way to break out of the traps of the writing style I use for blogging. The idea was to progress from shorter exercises to longer ones, doing some fictional writing as well (and perhaps even some poetry before I'm done). So far I have done a week of 10-minute free-writing exercises and a week of 500-word exercises writing from found pictures. My goal this week is to write one or two "mini-short-stories".
The 10-minute exercises weren't terribly good pieces of writing -- they're not really supposed to be. What I got out of them was that I was still waaaaay too inside my own head to do any other writing. With that in mind, I made a sincere effort last week to get as far away from myself as possible and I focused on vignettes that were fictional characters. I actually liked some of the stuff I wrote last week and may expand on one or two of those characters this week.
I should also note that my "offline" life is a little busy this week, so I probably won't have anything to post this week until Thursday. Next week will also probably be a Tuesday-Thursday posting schedule.
I enjoyed last week's exercises a lot and am looking forward to doing more. I would be very pleased indeed if the net result of this month's efforts was to restore the writing habit that I allowed to wither away. Writing has been an important activity in my life since I was 9 years old and wrote plays to perform in front of my fourth-grade class. Blogging almost every day for five years has been an interesting reinterpretation of a writing habit, but it worked to the detriment of everything else, and it's nice to see that the old ways have not just but have just been dormant.
I think your observations about how these exercises have progressed are right on target. I enjoyed the "person" exercises the most. Writing for the opposite gender is a real challenge. Being male it's hard for me to say how authentically your piece portrayed the female point of view, but I found it interesting and enjoyable. In that piece you also had the challenge of relating the events of period that is not part of our experience and expressing it as a memory. Neat.
In your "Person 2" exercise I particularly liked your point about science being in the ideas and not the gadgets. It's easy to get caught up in the flash and coolness of a piece of technology, but the real work is in the way we conceive of the world around us.
I did start off with the very first exercise and simply wasn't able to keep up with it in real time. But I may go back and do more of them.
Thanks for sharing these.
Posted by Tony [URL] at 02/17/06
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