Have you ever challenged yourself to write about anything? How would you approach the task if the offered theme was something utterly exotic to you? Would you go straight at it or would you dance in circles around it?
(Image: Painting by Mia Tarducci, Colorful Words)
I've written newspaper articles, solid news pieces; sports reviews, with a knack for onesidedness; political analysis, with a tendency; technical issues, full of rigour; weekly chronicles, sometimes humurous; poems, from the heart and from the air; essays, filled with deep definitions and concepts; I've even ghost written hefty political speeches and their respective policy papers. Freewriting, however, I never did until recently. In a serious manner, I mean. Of course I did all the "write a composition about" stuff that they threw at all of us in primary school, but Freewriting, in earnest, just for the fun of it, was a totally new thing for me up until a few weeks ago, and I'm enjoying it immensely.
Obviously, I did the odd creative writing course and the weekend workshop on how to write a novel, and I had a solid preparation in the domain of using a wide variety of languages, but I really wasn't aware of the existence of Freewriting as a "thing". As a publishable thing, if you get my drift. Writing whatever comes to your mind in ten minutes or so, or flow out a poem in the space of a cigarrette was totally alien to me as an activity able to produce something that other people would enjoy reading. Here lies the Quaestio Busilis, the detail that gave me pause: how do I work my words in a way that will make for an enjoyable read?
Exposing oneself by ways of Freewriting is a much more challenging task than any other kind of writing I ever handled before. The issue lies, in my opinion, in a twofold problematic: on one side, the writer is much more prone to doubt himself and fear the publishing; on the other, the apparent lack of rules means there are many ways to make one slide along the mayo into a disastrous publication. Of course the matter becomes much more tender if we are publishing among fellow Freewriters, still, this case has the author publish in a medium that is universally available and will exist forever (at least until the fatal solar eruption that erases all servers, which is the same as pointing to the unpredictable future).
Confronted with this, I subjected myself to a deep dive into my "Brain Warehouse", or library, (if you don't have one, building it is an eidetic exercise I recommend in order to organize your thoughts), and do a profound analisys of the texts that I've been keeping in my head all along the years in order to discover what about them made me, first, enjoy them, and then, remember them. The conclusion I have reached was quite astonishing: the texts I remember most vividly were the ones that imprinted an image like memory into my mind. Those texts became like paintings I could hang in the walls of my library. And I remebered that it's fairly usual for artists to use texts as prompts to create images and figured that the reverse process should be equally valid.
Is it imagination or a technique? That discovery was the challenge ahead, and that is where I started realizing that words play tricks on us. "Imagination" means no more and no less than the production of an image, so, I had to set myself on the task to create a technique of imagination, or, to put it more simply, to create a couple of rules that I could use every time in order to create a written image. I'm still refining that method in ways that maybe one day I can fully explain, but, for now, I have arrived at the point where I can safely say that I found a process I can use to make my task simpler: create a multi-dimensional image in my mind; select a viewpoint; paint what I see, hear and feel in a coherent way. Paint, with words, that is, and always determine the endpoint before I start writing.
It doesn't matter if it is a photo or a movie, but you have to create that image, or else, you will just be reporting, and not really freewriting. And, writing based on a random word or picture is no Rorschach test either. If you get a picture, you have to get yourself into it, if you get a word, you zoom yourself out. At least, that's what I think. I also think that there's a lot more to this that I must explore and that there are still ways, that are unfathomable to me, to get a definition of better, more acurate rules to folow. The ones I found are not yet satisfactory to me, so, I'll keep on digging into this matter and trying to come up with a better set of instructions to work this new, beautiful form of art that I found.
What do you think about this?
07.02.25 @hefestus
Afterword: Does this even make any sense, @almaguer, @wakeupkitty and @weisser-rabe?
This is the first thing that jumped at me:
Nor 'analysis' nor the opposite but a slightly queer variation of it.
This is my own approach: association instead of imagination, free flowing without reaching the originally intended end or conclusion. More discovering than explanation or description.
In a contingent way, for me. Coherence seems to be a corset or railing since it is a pre-occupation of the mind, a thing of conceptual premises. Coherence is nice but not real.
Therefore I like digression and diversion as these can be useful in revealing unseen images, unthought theses, unscented flavours.
On the other hand - you are very right not to overwhelm your readers. Therefore the consideration could be: whose are they for whom I intend to write? This means not to have a concrete image of the readers but a feeling of the audience. And the wish to write something you would like to read yourself.
For my own part I like to be pushed to 'new' ways of looking at the world.
Regarding words inspired by images (photos, paintings, collages) I am someone who steps into such an image and carry back what I experienced (or what came from the dark depth of the subconscious to the surface and humble light of my consciousness), be it fictitious, surreal or mere fantasy.
One rule:
Try to not repeat the earlier used routes.
Nevertheless I like your way.
;-)
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I like your way, and have experienced with it before, especially in creating poetry. I do have a limit though: I need to keep my thoughts coherent and there is a door into the deepest recesses of my darkest self that I will not pass, and believe me; I can get pretty gory even before I get there. (As you have been so kind as to give me an extended explanation of your method, I will make an exception and tell you why, and you will excuse me for not being too concrete about this). I have been to places and seen things that most men would take a lifetime to forget, and I managed, In some way to compartmentalize that part of my memory, the feelings that it evoques and the things I did and know I am able to do again if ever required. To not break through that door, I must keep my thoughts inside the box of coherence, so, if I do start writing something that borders the chaos of letting myself drop into that bottomless pit, I retract from it, reorganize it and start the search for meaning and coherence, so I can keep living within myself.
It is not you who is wrong. It is I, who am limited.
Thanks for your thoughts.
:)
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Lo que comenzó como un comentario. Terminó en un Post de pequeños pensamientos. Me gustó lo que escribiste y me hizo pensar en muchas cosas, que no había tomado en cuenta.
El mayor logro de todo esto es que lo importante siempre será lo que sientes (el placer de crear) cuando escribes sobre la página en blanco.
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Esa si, és la verdad. Lo que los otros acaban por leer está, muchas veces, dentro de si mismos. Solamente podemos apreciar el que nosotros mismos sentimos, y, creo que eso tien que bastar para justificar el nuestro esfuerzo. Si no és una actividad aprazible, no sirve a nadie.
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I call - once again - @ty-ty to the scene; I think the way of approaching a text that you describe corresponds strongly to his way of working. Perhaps he can explain it in more detail...
I myself prefer to write about things that I feel comfortable with: my specialisms, my interests, my experiences, my dreams, fears, ideas... I have the ambition to do this as perfectly as possible. I'm not really interested in trying my hand at material that wouldn't normally inspire me to write. The few times I've tried in this direction haven't satisfied me...
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I dig you. I guess it's a matter of how much you love a challenge and how used you are to working with multidimensional images inside your head. Imaging is the way I found works better for me as way to work through the challenge of mastering several different languages. I found it's quite useful for freewriting, too.
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