Saturday, December 8, 2012

Free writing challenge

In one of my classes we at the opportunity to ask Tom Gammarino, who wrote the fancy short story Jellyfish Dreams questions about his life as an author and his connections to video games. He left us with a challenge to write quickly about anything. Better leave you with his words:
Now you're going to freewrite for ten minutes. There is only one rule: your hand cannot stop moving for even a nanosecond. Don't worry about meaning and sense. Don't worry about misspellings or grammar. Just write, headlong and as fast as you can. Outwrite your mind. If your thoughts bottom out, you can write about how stupid this exercise is and what an idiot I am for proposing you do it. That's fine. This is an evaluation-free zone. As long as you're writing, you're doing this correctly. Oh, you must be writing English words, and no doodling. On your marks, get set, go!
I do this quite a lot, and often I find it yields really strange images and surrealistic juxtapositions that I never could have planned. Even when you're feeling blocked, you can always do this. It's probably not true, but I like to imagine that the most hardcore surfer goes out and paddles around even when there are no waves to speak of. 
Tom Gammarion about his freewriting challenge

So here is with what I came up, admitting that is was not that easy for me because my speed of writing in English is a lot slower that my process of thinking so I ended up with thinking about what I want to write which kinda misses the challenge...
Slowly you awake..you don't know were you are but it seems to be a forest, at least there are trees all around you. You notice that there is not much sound around you, well there are different sounds which are unfamiliar to you. Since born and raise in a city you collected most of your experiences with forests or nature in general from stories you overheard in taverns or at the docks.
So this is new for you. But even if it feel slightly uncomfortable to be in a place you don't know with no memory of how you got there, inside you there is the urge to discover this strange place. It took some time but after a few minutes you can't resist that urge any longer and start wandering around. Quickly you see that this might not be really classified as a forest, there are a lot of trees but they have a lot of spacing in between so you can see all the grass, flowers and bushes on the ground. In the distance you see mountains. Wandering around you can't help but enjoying this place, everything seems peaceful and calm. So different from everything you know so maybe that's what makes it this interesting.
As you get hungry you see that there are a lot of bushes with berries around, and after short hesitations you try them. They are great, much more fresher than anything you are used to from your city and so you can enjoy a nice meal here. This place seems more friendlier with a full stomach and you really begin to like it, but you feel that the night is near and it might be a good idea to search for shelter, there should be a bunch of opportunities around but you should be quick..

So buy his book and try this challenge yourself, I think it's a nice way to get thoughts from your brain to paper.

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