carried away

Freewriting

Getting Started: Freewriting

Freewriting: A Means of Teaching Critical Thinking to College Freshman

Freewriting is a technique I learned years ago in high school. The above 2 links go into greater detail about the method, its history and its benefits. Basically it is an exercise in associative thinking where there are guidelines, but no formal rules. The guidelines are:

1. Choose a topic
2. Set a timeframe (5-20 minutes)
3. Write, uncensored and without stopping, for the allotted amount of time
4. Don't be overly concerned with spelling, grammer or punctuation
5. When your time is up, read aloud what you wrote (or post it on your weblog, unedited)

Its harder than it sounds. Until you can discipline yourself to write without editing there is a tendancy to build your thoughts dialectically. The exercise of course is to see what associations the uninhibited mind will bring. The resulting piece is often the genesis of something lyrical and persausive.

NOTE: It would be interesting to use the TrackBack feature to link people's freewriting together. Maybe if there were common topics, writers could work as a collective and see what associations came up. To some degree I guess that's what's happening right now as weblogs get more popular. If only I could understand how to actually use TrackBack.

Grassroots: The Freewriting Experiment

The passage below is from a freewriting session. I'm posting this without having read it yet.

Topic: Grassroots
Timeframe: 10 minutes

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grassroots. the blades of grass that are anchored to the roots that are anchored to the soil. the siol beneath the yard. that makes up the earth wehre the earthworms swim. swim in the dirt and create tunnels and chambers that areate the ground. the ground that is being covered by the grass. it becomes the yard. a sea of green blades rolling into the distance. many blades of grass tied to the roots. grassroots campaigns of people in numbers like a sea of green grass. banding together to form a lawn, a yard, a sea of heads. a yard of voices. writing and tapping and pounding away at keys to make themselves heard. across the yard. far across the lawn. the sea of voices like blades of grass.

typepad backend technology written in Pearl. like the roots that the soil grabs. like the roots that the soul grabs and attaches itself to the dirt below. a sea of words like blades of grass. noodles of grass blades swaying in voice. yelling and screaming and crying out across the yard. where our toes grab on to the blades of grass and pull at the roots. each one passing by. steping and running. lying on my back looking up at the sky. I can feel the grass. and bugs in the grass. jumping up on my self. tickeling my self as i lie on the yard. the templates and stylesheets like roots for our grass.

and people that gathers. cows that eat grass. grassroot campaigns that start to make numbers. with heads of people. their mouths all have voices. the leader they are looking for to lead their grassroots. at a close view is like a jungle of green bladed jungle. where the roots meet the earth and connect to the grass. that connects to the sky with the people in the middle. at night and at day. for children today and later today we will run on the lawn and yell at the sky. to whoever hears us yell on the grass. the bugs and the poeple and cows that eat grass.

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The guidelines of freewriting are to choose a topic and a timeframe, and then write about that topic for the given amount of time without stopping. I'm inviting people to respond to the passage above with a passage of your own, and then TrackBack to this post. I'm curious to see what happens.

Just A Minute

[Link found via Malin samlar]

Along the lines of the Freewriting Experiment, one word gives you 60 seconds to write about a given word. The results are archived and can be viewed when you're done writing.

Recording Histroy: The Freewriting Experiment

The passage below is from a freewriting session. I'm posting this without having read it yet.

Topic: Recording History
Timeframe: 10 minutes

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this is a recording. a recording of history. when i started this weblog I didn't know why i was doing it. I just wanted to becasue I like reading other people's weblogs. I knew something was going on but wasn't sure what. for a while and maybe even still I don't know what my weblog is about. but today when I woke up I started thinkng about history and how every recording no matter how mundane is a document that will exist in history for other people to see later. even if later is 5 minutes from now.

tomorrow is the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. it is recent history. news and media and tv have covered it since it happened. people will most likely write all over their blogs tomorrow about what they were doing when it happened. at least that's what i'm expecting. hoping for to read other's accounts of what ever they thought. that's what I'm planning to do. my part of history. otherwise the future will only know what has been recorded by professionals.

i'm a pretend professional. i'm not even a writer per say but i write. people write about knitting a lot and i've been wondering about that. and kids and bikes and hockey and war and jesus and god and atheist that don't believe in god. muslims and christians and 10 commandments and Kobe. I never liked kobe bryant. he's an imposter to the throne. since i live in chicago and the rights belong to the bulls. they're lucky mj quit.

and history will repeat itself or that's what the saying is. french histroy, world history, american history, spelling errors and spelling bees. and b 2 bombers at war making history. his story and her story. all the stories combined. backspacing over lives already made fammous by fifteen minutes of fame a day. andy warhol was right but got the time increment wrong. and mapplethorpe was gay and dressed in black in new hamsphire where we saw the exhibit. raining with funions on the way back

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The guidelines of freewriting are to choose a topic and a timeframe, and then write about that topic for the given amount of time without stopping. I'm inviting people to respond to the passage above with a passage of your own, and then TrackBack to this post, or just leave it in the 'comments' of this post.

Cutup Results

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The Grazulis Cut-up Machine

"Cut-up" is a writing technique made popular by Beat writer William Burroughs. It involves cutting up text and then rearranging the order of the original paragraphs, sentences and/or words in an effort to deconstruct language and further understand the meaning of "meaning".

Grazulis has provided a Cut-up Machine that will take your text and randomly rearrange it into another version of itself. You can take the result and run it through the generator ad infinitum and end up with something unexpectedly cryptic.

Also from the site:

With the advent of computers we have a powerful tool for breaking down the barriers that we believe exist in language. One experiment, suggested by Umberto Eco in "Foucault's Pendulum" is to take a text in a word processor and do a find and replace on key words or letters. By breaking down the forced meanings we can gain a different understanding of language and its purpose. A computer can also create a program that will cut up and rearrange texts for you at random.

He Said, She Said

The following is the result of an experiment I was trying a couple weeks ago. I randomly found a bunch of journalesque weblogs, and then went deep into the archives of those weblogs. I randomly copied the most anonymous sentences and pasted them together to see what would happen. I corrected some of the spelling and added some conjunctions here and there to tie some of the sentences together, but for the most part the sentences were left in tact. Some of it matches up coherently.

[Update 9/29: I highlighted the 2 conjunctions that were added. All the other sentences were left as they were originally found except for; a spelling change, the deletion of a couple exclaimation marks, and the addition of an apostrophe.]

My intention was to have all the thoughts of the writers work in concert as that's kind of the way I perceive the blogsphere to be, many conversations happening simultaneously. I had seen a movie about the composer Glen Gould where he is sitting in a diner and listening to the patrons all talk at once, as if the voices were a musical score. For a while I looked into creating an internet radio station that would play street sounds (I thought it might help people concentrate when they were trying to read or write.)

So this is the result:

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Today I did actually have the day to myself, and it was great. I was so pissed, so i said fuck it and left, I went to the outside court and started shooting on my own. The waiter was amazing and I was sad to head home after such a night. We were not going to have our lives be tied to having to be within 40 minutes of a job and yes, my parents piss me off sometimes, but I find that talking to them, even if it turns into a fight, will always help out the situation. So i'll start using it soon, but i'll let everyone know so don't stress out, woah, just calm down. Jesus...

He hooked me up like only he could. My heart wouldn't have been so deeply impacted with that concept had I not experienced months of that, waiting to get to work and get busy helping people. He may repent and atone; this might make others forgive him, but wasn't marriage originally a contract between a brides father and groom similar to land purchase? No thank you. I will always think back to where I was, just like everyone else, but now i have found something far worse. You see, in our apartment there is a washing machine. Did it work? Definitely not.

I always felt safer with a light on. There's something about darkness that just doesn't feel good or comfortable. Now she must have thought I was a silly man because she had either looked at a lot of cakes or eaten a lot of them. At an appropriate time we grabbed some beer, cider & chocolate. The only way to do that is to do it yourself, or be in the company of like mined souls who don't let their creative passions be run by who's signing their checks.

A reoccuring theme for me is a wavering confidence that what I'm doing is the appropriate thing. Even though this costs more than a 20oz bottle of soda, I'm willing to pay more because, well, OJ is an organic product which requires a bit more effort to grow and distribute. We are fighting for our principles and beliefs, and we can win this fight with your support.

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These are the weblogs the sentences come from:

01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

I resisted posting this for a while. I'm not sure if its stealing or eavesdropping or intrusive in anyway. What are the rules about that?

Novel In November

[Link found via Three Worlds]

There's an online project facilitating the kick in the ass it takes to get a novel started. In fact not only does NaNoWriMo help you get started, but it sets the goal of finishing the entire thing in a month. By the way that's writing a 50,000 word novel in a month, not reading one.

From the website:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

Sounds right up my alley, because you know the great American novel is somewhere in my hindered spirit, somewhere in there next to all the cliches. I set up another blog to document how far I get: Carey Armstrong's Head First. (Carey Armstrong is a name I made up a while ago.)

A word of warning: the NaNoWriMo site is extremely slow and buggy. Maybe because as of this morning when I checked there were already 21,500 people signed up.

Some Problems Are Easier To Solve Than Others

Of the 99 problems in my life that need to be solved this one seems the least worthy of writing about. Its probably the easiest to solve and maybe that's why I'm writing. Maybe this is just an attempt to put off dealing with the rest of them.

I'm about to leave the house and take care of a 2 year old nuisance. That is to say a problem that has been plaguing my life for 2 years, and not a 2-year old that may be construed as a nuisance.

A couple of years ago I noticed I only own 3 spoons. I had to learn to mix the sugar and milk in my morning coffee with a fork 5 days out 7, because my life is far to busy to take care of trivial matters like washing the dishes more than once a week. However clever this may seem there is no practical way, at least none that I'm aware of, to eat soup or cereal with milk using a fork. You can eat Snak-Pak Pudding with a fork though. You can even eat ice cream with a fork, but not liquid based foods.

You might find it impressive that as a single male my kitchen utensils include a whisk, a bread knife, and 3 different rice paddles. I just wanted to mention this in case you thought I was some kind of anti-consumer making an anti-consumerist statement about material possessions, my not having enough spoons. That wouldn't be true. Over the last week I've convinced myself that I not only want, but need this camera, and now convinced, I'm about ready to pull the trigger.

So last night I'm cooking one of the few things I know how to cook, a big bowl of cereal, when I notice that I only have 2 spoons. What happened to the third one? I don't know where they go, these spoons. I sat and wondered about that for a while. After half an hour I realized where they go and how they get there isn't really important and the whole problem, this problem that has been a major bane of my lifestyle, a lifestyle that on the surface seems together and therefore enviable to most, could be solved simply and effectively by buying more spoons. If I do this, I'm thinking now, my life will seem even more together than it already is and thus more enviable. My daily walk through the city at morning and night is sure to show a new found confidence. My stride will proclaim to other lesser people that mine's is a life of purpose and achievement.

And so this is what I shall do right now: I will go to Bed, Bath and Beyond right now and head for the Beyond section and I will buy new spoons, and when I'm done I will walk home triumphant carrying away a bag embolden with the Bed, Bath and Beyond logo, conspicuous to everyone, obvious to everyone that I am a person who has recently upgraded my life to one not only of utility, but also stylishness. People should be, will be, in awe. I will be dandy and at last the spoon problem will be crossed off my list.

(I should stop here and point out that if the effacing sarcasm and pseudo self-congratulatory tone of retelling even the most mundane event rings a bell its because I've been reading Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for the last couple weeks. [see also; Eggers Interview] I'm really not at all together. I don't even know how to use commas or hyphens properly. I was just trying something.)

This has been an installment of Up To the Minute Minutia.