Writing Exercise: Creating Now for Later

There is a method I use to help inspire me when I have writer’s block. It’s simple to do and it is undisciplined: I simply write anything. An example of this is a piece I jotted down recently using the theme of unoriginality. My idea is that just about everything written has been said before and even expressed in the same manner by others. My only fault in writing this was that my subject was not narrow enough for the brevity of the paper.

To tighten the focal point of my exposition would have worked better. A precise argument is always the most effective; yet, my goal was not to create something publishable, but to cobble together an article which I might cannibalize later. To get my artistic juices flowing, I took an idea, rough on the surface, and ran with it. I am not proud of this composition; and, I am not anxious to publish it here. But, I think the purpose it serves is to demonstrate the decree I have been living by as a writer for most of my life; and, that is that a writer writes…always.

Many of my blog posts are rejuvenated works that I wrote years, even decades earlier. Much of my newer material is still evolving; maturing like bottled wine in the cellar until such time I find it necessary to take them out to breathe, and to be posted here. One of my recent blog posts was born of an extended poem I used as part of my training regimen back in the 1980s. The surest way I know that a story, poem, article, or essay I wrote is not finished is when I cannot come up with a suitable title for it. That is the case with the paper I will show you here. The idea is sturdy, but not fine enough. The last paragraph does not finish as strong as I would like it too, the imagery is almost non-existent, and I can’t find a proper name for this work. However, I like much of what I came up with and I intend to store it away in my notebooks and produce it again at such time when I believe I can tackle my treatise with the skill and voracity it deserves.

For today, this piece serves me well as a catalyst which propels me forward and keeps my literary voice honed. The working title of this workout is “In-distinction.” Perhaps other writers employ similar methods to keep themselves sharp, and I imagine all of us have volumes of unpalatable material saved on legal pads, loose leaf paper, and their computers. At great risk, I offer you mine here.


In-distinction

It’s difficult to grasp that there are almost six billion souls in the world today. Staggering still is the notion that there were billions more who lived before them. I am one; one man who feels the echoes of them all. My writing, as sparse and understated as any deficient poet, can merely express my own thoughts and meanderings let alone take on the accounting of civilization.

What I sense at my core is a ripple; several of them perhaps, and they spread from my heart to the tips of the hairs on my neck causing me to shudder. There is a spark to my stuttering; realizing that I speak for myself, yet others articulate the same things. Without ever meeting these copycat spirits both alive and dead who suggest my own ideas and relate my own calamities as they all experienced the same; I see now, I am not distinctive.

My mind is not my own as it was hewn from vast cosmic material as indestructible as God Almighty. Scraps of flesh from the departed are snug among the particles which make up my identity. We share humility, shame, agony, joy, selflessness, curiosity, delight, jealousy, and shades and shades of tempered sensations which repeat themselves across the eons on this worldly theater.

I can tell you about Jesus! Believe, believe, believe and then enlighten everyone. Write about my devotion, my conservatism, and my faith in spirituality over organized religion, and then pen my views. Won’t that make a compelling book? You wrote it already, didn’t you?

My thoughts are not yours. These words, they’re copyrighted, original, unstained by another’s pen. Whose work came first? Feel pain? I do. Want love? I am in love. Are you grieving? Here I am, let me tell you a story. My story, is it authentic? Do I remember it or does my great-grandfather? Ask my grandchildren as they will evoke this when they are born.

Food, sex, television, sports, beer, cars, music; I can write about those things. My novels appear significant; tales of men and women committed and their families slain. What about adoration and casualty? Did I say all of that with seventy six thousand words? How novel.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll discover a secret vault with all of the passions and clever schemes no other human ever experienced before. Have you seen it? My Forefathers did. I remember.


Maybe it isn’t that bad after all? Pay careful attention, because there is at least one line in there which is headed for a blog post coming up in the near future. I can hear the complaints already: “What do you mean, more re-runs?” No, not re-runs; just the same old thing, but better.





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Incriminating Evidence

One of the methods I use to get that sort of sweaty, pulse-pounding emotion that writer's hope to achieve when creating fiction, is to write about people in my life and create events which I pray to God never happen, or would never do myself because it would be so, so wrong. I perform an exercise where I work out plot details by pretending to do some of the bad things my characters are going to commit by placing myself in their shoes. In order to generate an authentic environment for myself, I take real people from my life and put them into situations with myself as the actor so I can achieve an understanding of how it may feel for my character to do the same thing.

If I have a character who wants to kill his best friend, I’ll boot up my computer and type out a scenario where my buddy Frank gets on my nerves and I will go nuts, grab a rifle and…you know. Of course, no one, not even my wife reads these texts as she would never understand what it is I am doing. It'd be a bit hard to explain that I really don’t have a crush on the woman I bring my dry cleaning to.


The girl at the dry cleaners is in her twenties, thin with a dancer's build, dark hair, single, and has at least one tattoo I noticed on the small of her back. Her skin seems to be permanently tanned, even in the winter, and she is always happy to see me. In truth, she's happy to see anybody. But, when I am working on characters, I imagine more. One of the stories I am crafting at this moment involves a police officer who is cheating on his wife with his partner's wife. There's a lot more to my new story than mere infidelity (as if that weren't enough) but I wanted to make sure I knew what is was to actually cheat on my wife without going out and having a bona-fide affair. That's where Leah, the dry cleaning "hot babe" comes in.

On paper (okay, in Microsoft Word) I drop off my dry cleaning one day and notice Leah bending over in front of me to write up the receipt. Her blouse is opened a bit more than usual and I can see an ample amount of cleavage. Her bra, black, with spaghetti-thin straps is also a tad loose and there is a nipple slip. There are no tan lines, and my eyes are fixed on her breasts. Leah looks up and notices that I was peeking. Looking away, I'm embarrassed. My face feels warm, and my mouth begins to spew out all kinds of nonsense about baseball, the weather...anything. Leah smiles, and bends over again. Now what do I do?

This simple, married, slightly over-weight, middle aged guy can take this many different directions. Does Leah want me to see more of her and less of her clothing somewhere more private? Or is Leah oblivious to the fact that she is exposed? What if I go in there again and we begin some sort of heavy flirting? All of this can be written out and lead to something that reads like a porno movie script, but, it is not the text that is the point. The objective is to vicariously experience cheating without actually doing it.

In real life, Leah would probably smack me if I looked down her shirt. I'd be a fool to believe that I had any sort of a chance with someone like her, and I'd never flirt with any woman while my wife was still living. Nevertheless, this sort of exercise can be used to imagine murder, betrayal, abuse of different kinds (No, I am not a good father after all, you rotten kids) and the key is that I involve real people whom I know so that I can relate to what happens on a very personal level. This becomes the grist for my writing which contains even more emotion because I can readily imagine what the characters are going through.

Leah will not show up as a character in this story. Still, I used her because she is forbidden not only because I'm married, but because she is twenty years younger than me and she is way out of my league looks-wise. This example with Leah is more than just a mere sex fantasy; it is taking my normal encounters with her and attempting to establish a believable context where the two of us could be together for an illicit affair. In my effort to create a "suspension of disbelief" in which the reader would go along with the premise that a forty-four year old man can seduce a twenty-four year old woman, I plotted this out with someone I know in order to create an air of authenticity. The character for my story is my age, and his new partner is a rookie in his twenties as well as his young wife who is beautiful. That is why it was necessary for me to choose someone like Leah because she the same age as the person my protagonist will be having a licentious affair with. But, no one will ever read the actual piece about me and Leah, especially my wife.

So far, these exercises where I work out plot details using friends, relatives, and acquaintances of mine has worked; at least from my standpoint. It is fun, in a way to take innocuous dealings with my friends, family, and acquaintances and carry them to extremes. It is also imperative that I keep these notes private. If my wife ever got a hold of my secret "files" and read them not understanding how I employ this technique, I'd find myself in divorce court the next day and she'd be looking over her shoulder for a hit man, testing the brakes on her car, and having the dog taste all of her food. After all, I can't offer to drive Leah home from work after her car's engine mysteriously siezes if my wife's alive, can I? That would be cheating.

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