But first I have to work, to earn the price of a few nights of fish and chips, and maybe the odd massage if I'm very lucky ...
And on Thursday I'm running a workshop for research students at my local university hospital. They're working on life-saving ideas to treat cancer, and neonatal diseases and MRSA. I know I wouldn't be able to understand their research in detail, but I can help them write. I can also help them think about writing. And I thought today I'd share the exercise I most enjoyed doing when it was given to me, and I was a participant. It was given by Heather Dyer, at an event I did with the Royal Literary Fund. Of everything we did that day, it was the simplest and easiest to reproduce.
It goes like this.
We're going to do some free writing. You're going to spend a minute or two thinking of a problem that's on your mind at the moment. It might be something in your work in progress, or something in real life (that life that seems to fade into the background when the WIP is going really well). There. Are you thinking about it?
Great. Now we're going to write for three minutes. And the rule is simply this: you have to keep writing that whole time. We're after quantity, not quality. No pausing for thought, no pausing full stop. If you can't think what say then just write the last word you wrote down before your brain dried up and keep writing it until the thoughts come flowing back again. OK? Three minutes. And I want you to write about ...
What the solution to the problem isn't.
Got that? Three minutes. Go.
...
...
...
Done? Lovely.
Did your brain fight back? Mine did, when I did the exercise. It started off magnificently explaining a couple of solutions that would never work and then after about a minute it deliberately, mischievously decided to ignore the clear instruction and start to tell me what the solution to the problem was.
What to do? To obey the instruction to keep writing, which didn't give me time to work out how to tell my brain to behave, or to follow what it was telling me to write instead?
How you choose to write is up to you.
I loved that exercise. But that was just part one. Heather then told us to look through what we'd written and find two words that stood out, then spend a few seconds thinking about those words, then ... three more minutes of free-writing - whatever came to us, this time. And in those two exercises combined I solved three major stumbling blocks (can you solve a block? you know what I mean) about how to tackle the narration of my latest story idea.
It's a simple premise: our brains often like to solve problems subconsciously, when we're thinking about something else. Sometimes we just have to give them room to do that work, and grab onto the results and go with them when they come. I'm hoping that my days in Devon will give my brain a similar opportunity to go off and have fun while I stare out towards Burgh Island, so beloved of Agatha Christie, then come back to me with a series of problems solved.
We'll see what happens. And if it doesn't work this time, there's always the fish and chips.
3 comments:
Great advice thanks for sharing. Enjoy the fish and chips!
Thank you, Lynda! :)
Sophia, I've come to your post late! How wonderful to read about your experiences with that writing exercise I led at the conference. I'm absolutely thrilled to bits that it led to some insights for you. Lovely!
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