Can the calisthenics of 5-minute-freewrites build muscle for...NaNoWriMo??

in #freewrite5 years ago

NaNoWriMo!

is coming up - November, how soon you arrive - and every year for ten years now, I have ignored the call to practice freewriting every day for a month with the goal of composing 50,000 or more words of new material.

But this year, fortified by @mariannewest's #5minutefreewrite, I'm thinking I could do this thing.


Yes, I've written about writing before.

E.g., #Freewriting unleashes inner demons, opens new doors.
Today my burning issue is whether to go back and revise the story that emerges in freewrite before the 7-day window closes (yep, done that, and publicly confessed already).... or let a 5-minute freewrite evolve into a 5-part story over the course of a week, and what will be will be.... or.... let the freewrite take on a life of its own for a whole month, as per the daunting rules of .... NaNoWriMo!

The beauty of 5-minute freewrites is their spontaneity

(among other things!). Stories flow swiftly when we're prohibited from over-thinking them thanks to the terrifying but inspiring dictate to start writing whatever comes to mind and *no stopping for 5 minutes.

"Not overthinking" can lead to under-thinking,

of course. All kinds of inconsistencies might slip unbidden from our pen (keyboard).

Rewriting and revision are inevitable

for most writers.

The very spontaneity that liberates a story from the prison of our mind

can also lead us to a change of course if we keep the same characters and setting in mind for the next day's prompt. Lots of us have done it! E.g.,

@improv models this novel concept:

Not Smart -5minutefreewrite, a Chibera Chapter

has evolved from Prologue, The World Tree to Chapter 10, Shalgarth.

How many of us are using freewrites to fuel longer stories?

Morning coffee + newspaper tend to input data in my mind, and whatever I saw in the news is likely to feed into a story. E.g., the name Quartez caught my eye after I'd written "Even Steven" and caused me to Edit a Freewrite--I had to revise a minor character from meek and balding and un-named to sassy, impertinent, and well acquainted with Steven (whose fiance kept dumping off his stuff at the Salvation Army).

Another change evolved this week with Ennis, the last girl standing after a sudden storm floods her people off the side of the mountain. Monday, in "swift mode" (pansters vs plotters love freewrite!), I wrote,

Ennis did all her chores and ducked the disapproving stares of her siblings, classmates, neighbors, and--well, friends, no, those existed only in books or in feathered, scaled, or furry forms. When the first expedition was launched, she had already familiarized herself with every inch of the meadow and mountainside.


Expedition. Exploratory committees staking out places to build. The next day's prompt, "well being," would have worked for Ennis in her solitary confinement on the mountaintop, but I didn't want to violate the spirit of the freewrite by trying to contrive a story-in-progress around the prompt. So I wrote something completely different, inspired by our cat Bobinksi, and in the story, the woman has abandoned the "man of the house," which is pure fiction, even though Bobi, unfortunately, is not fiction. We are stuck with him.

Human homes in unsafe places

showed up as a news item the same day as the "orange blossom" prompt. I fell into a sense of urgency about wildfires and mudslides taking down our homes as ruthlessly as we humans fell trees with bird nests and raccoon dens. I resisted the urge to go on and on about hubris and how we adults can feel as immortal or unduly optimistic as our teenage offspring tend to do.

Monday's freewrite needed an overhaul, but I left it as is, for now. And I failed to tone down my rant on hubris. I indulged. Isn't that part of freewriting?

Self-Indulgence

Is part of why we write, right?

And so Monday's expedition in the Ennis story evolved into the starship of Earthlings who've already started colonizing the new planet by staking out claims and building homes:

The homes seem to defy gravity, perched along sheer cliffs overlooking splendid views of the new planet. Eternal optimists, the colonists forget how natural disasters strike with expected yet “unforeseen” frequency and ferocity. Nature can hammer the wilderness and life will go on, but human development magnifies the suffering that follows the storm.

source


Last month, for one week, I experimented with keeping the same characters and story going with each new daily prompt, but by Friday, I could see that freewriting wasn't the way to get this story told. Instead of letting the prompt take me to places I'd never pictured and characters I'd never thought of, I was trying to force the prompt into a preconceived story.

A random prompt can free up a story that's been stuck

for years, and that's why I have to write this essay about writing.

Monday's prompt gave me the missing element that had kept me--for years--from writing a story that's been on my mind forever. I had spent countless hours of my childhood staring at Grandma's landscape above the sofa, a Paul Detleffson, and thinking it looked so real, I should be able to walk right into the picture.

source

But how easy would it be to walk back out again?

The older I got, the more Twilight Zone episodes I'd seen and time travel stories, the harder it was to spin off an easy little tale of a boy who climbs into a painting of Grandpa and Grandma and visit them for a spell, then come home again with tall tales to tell his laughing "it was just a lovely dream" mother.

The prompt - what do bananas taste like - led me into a darker place, a dystopian or post-apocalyptic future where a boy had never tasted fresh fruit, and was quite ill because of it. In true freewrite fashion, old Mrs. Wedeking and her crocheting came out of nowhere and planted herself in a chair by the sofa.

Freewriting liberates characters from the prison of our minds,

if we as writers have neglected to open those doors and let out the stories collecting dust inside our heads.

NaNoWriMo!

So help me God, I swear I saw a post on it HERE at Freewritehouse, but I've hunted under @mariannewest, #freewrite and #freewritehouse, in vain for that post. No matter. This year, fortified by @mariannewest's #5minutefreewrite, I'm thinking I can do this thing.

Thanks, everyone at #freewritehouse, and all who read and comment on each other's freewrites!

  • Photo source: my sister Julie's diary and a short story she wrote at age 15, longhand, and presented to her freshman English teacher, unedited. It has all that freshness of a freewrite, and all the need of proofreading, editing, rewriting, and polishing. She would be horrified at having it published as is, but she was murdered at age 18, so I have taken the liberty: Brave as they Come - by Julie
Sort:  

I am so happy that you are going to write with us!!! Yay!!

The news item that caused me to rewrite Monday's freewrite:
A hurricane in the mountains? Natural disasters await far from the coastal storms, and almost no one there is talking about it I did link it to Facebook but that didn't satisfy my urge to rant, rant, rant (in the guise of fiction) about it.

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.37
TRX 0.12
JST 0.040
BTC 70162.45
ETH 3540.43
USDT 1.00
SBD 4.79