Ryan's Response

[Anonymous]

#588

Writing from the ….. I think I always have, or at least been taught to write from the unknown. In grade school, and for the beginning of high school, formal writing was always difficult for me. I never understood why or even how we were to write out a foundation for an essay, organize the information before even writing it. How do I organize information I haven’t even discovered? I haven’t even put the pen to the page so how will I know what is going to come out? I think I always believed that what you wrote was supposed to just flow out of you. Possibly came from seeing movies where an author is sitting at a typewriter. Words continued to fill the page line by line–occasionally the author pausing to come up with the right words, but overall in a stream of consciousness. As though the story being told has yet to be determined, that anything could happen by the time you get to the end. Once free writing was introduced to me in high school, I found I had a lot to say that I didn’t even know was there until I started writing. My 10th grade writing teacher taught the exercise to me from “Writing Down the Bones.” The exercise insisted that you write, non-stop for a solid 20 minutes, always keeping the pen or pencil in motion even if you thought you had nothing to write–then write that, “I have nothing to write,” over and over till something came. I still love the exercise and try to practice the technique even in my writing that I may have an idea as to what I want the piece to be about–allowing the availability of the unknown to effect the known. What interests me is the …. I suppose I’ve really never allowed myself to face that pause, to really hone into what could be in the ….. What might be there if I really stopped and tried to think what I might not be saying. I would love a hands-on approach uncovering the …. .

[Sondra Perl]

#592

Stay tuned…we are getting there soon. The exercise is, in some ways, the opposite of free writing which asks you to keep moving forward without stopping. I like free writing and am not disparaging it at all. Just saying that the process we will use will cultivate going back as much as going forward.

[Author]

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