October Novel Prep Challenge

Free writing can be tricky. You either get too many ideas that don't work, go off topic or just get on brilliantly. I'd always thought that freewriting is a waste of time but I had a new perspective in one of the talks I've attended of a person (a professional storyteller and moviemaker/ artist) who tries to teach the art of storytelling to a bunch of students. The ritual of these artists was to do strokes every morning when they got up, just drawing circles - drawing perfect circles. It's such a boring thing to do but yet, these students filled their sketchbooks with circles... and by and by, they moved on to more complicated things, adding more streaks to their circles, giving them shadows, depth, and all sorts of things and suddenly, they were drawing figures, facial expressions and all that.

That made me think... writing is really just the same thing. Sometimes, all we want to write is that thing that is relevant to our story but it takes a long time to get there. Sometimes, we might need to warm up with prompt writing and all that. My creative writing teacher used to tell us to adopt this ritual of getting up 15 minutes earlier and do nothing but write. I didn't see the point of it then and I tried doing it but I didn't know what came out of it. Now, I see it... when I went to this class and see the visual transition taking place, I understood what my teacher was telling me.

Sorry for being long-winded but my point is, free writing is really like taking a plunge in the sea. You might not know what come out of it. It doesn't seem relevant, you probably hate it... but you do actually get something in return, whether just getting into the zen, feeding your subconscious mind something... something is happening... even though you don't see it. You just need to believe that.

*hide*

Cheers,

Elycia Lee ☮