Who Says Nothing’s Free – Freewrite for Sale

GBE2 Prompt
WEEK #32 (12-25-11 to 12-31-11): 15 Minute Free Write

This week, we’re doing something a little different. Instead of a word or picture prompt, we’ll be free writing. For those of you unfamiliar with the process, it is exactly what it sounds like. You sit down and write whatever comes into your mind for 15 straight minutes. The goal is not to write a story, article, or even anything coherent.

It’s a word purge. A stream of consciousness babble-fest, and it’s a wonderful way to unleash your creativity.

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4:58 a.m.

Here I am, not freewriting. Huh? What do you mean, the prompt is for us to freewrite. Yeah, well, sometimes one has to go off prompt just a little bit. And besides that, if I were to really freewrite this morning I wouldn’t post it publically and my goal is to post it publically.

Technically this is sort of a freewrite because I’m not going to go back and correct for commas or other things I might be tempted to correct like typos but I probably don’t have to do that because Word fixes most of those automatically. I like freewriting and I have a history of freewriting but for me when I freewrite it gets tossed – or nowadays deleted – because everytime I freewrite it becomes a sort of personal thing. Almost like journaling and sometimes that can go deep and into places I don’t want to share on my blog. I’d like to share that type of stuff because I read blogs where people do share that type of stuff and I like it but I’m just not there yet. So when I go there, that freewriting thing, it generally goes into that dark, painful stuff and –

— I just don’t want to share it. Plus, while my freewrite might be interesting to me, I think it might be very uninteresting to others.

The TV is on in the other room and I just heard the theme for The Rifleman come on. I like that show. Obviously, which is why the TV is on that channel.

I have a history of freewriting. A college freshman and English 101 or whatever it was called back then and we’re doing freewriting. The idea from this teacher was to write random words down on a sheet of paper and then circle the words and then draw arrows randomly connecting the circles and then start writing with those words starting at the first circle and following our connectors. I didn’t like it. Many years later after I was laid off from a job I decided to go back to sshool and I took another English comp. class and we did freewriting again. This time it was what I would later realize was regular freewriting. Just start writing and keep going regardless. I liked it a little better but I still didn’t know how it made me a ‘good’ writer. It’s not like I was lacking for things to put down on paper, I just didn’t know how to put them down on paper and I wanted her to tell me how, not to tell me how to think of things I was already thinking of. So now flash forward a lot of years to three years ago and I take a Creative Writing class through Community Education and after the obligatory – and uncomfortable – introductions, we grab our pens and paper and, yeah, we freewrite.  So there I was again writing for no real reason and I’m writing about how my hand is sore or some other nonsense and wondering why the teacher isn’t teaching us to write. So even though I think freewriting is a good warm up exercise it’s one I don’t particularly like and when I hear the word freewrite it’s amost like I’m hearing, “Niagra Falls…”

Therre’s a commercial on TV now and they just announced the marathon of The Walking Dead which starts this morning. I never had AMC so I couldn’t watch the show and as a zombie fan I was upset about that. But I upgraded my cable service about a month ago and now I get AMC so now I can watch The Walking Dead. I have the DVD for season one and my plan is to tape the season 2 episodes and then I’ll be caught up on the series.

Remember what I said before about freewrites maybe being uninteresting to others? That paragraph is a good example of that.

New Years Eve and if my 15 minutes wasn’t up then I’d write about that and you’d really feel what it’s like to not only be uninterested, but bored out of your mind!

5:15 a.m.