Art of the Freewrite

And once again, I've had too much other stuff going on this week to produce any interesting new content. Think of this post as a small down payment toward more substantive updates in the future. (Also: drawing is difficult and time consuming.)

Earlier today I was looking through an old notebook and found a freewrite I remember doing about a year ago. It's really not long or good enough to be the the centerpiece of my weekly obligation to the Web Log Sphere, but...hm. Let's turn this into a participatory event.

Though I don't often do much freewriting, it can be an eminently invaluable exercise. Its main function is as a laxative for the part of the brain that tells the hand what letters to write. When you find yourself struggling to put an idea into words or laboring to produce an idea worth putting into words, one of the best methods of unclogging the works is to stop thinking about what you're writing and just write. Sit down, look at what's around you, and jot down your thoughts as they come. They probably won't be brilliant. You almost definitely will not end up with something worth mailing to The New Yorker. But you will often surprise yourself, and you can sometimes produce something to which you can hold on for future use. (Personally, I disagree with the Beats' "first thought, best thought" credo. The first thought provides the raw material for subsequent thoughts to chisel into form.)

Below this I've typed up the product of that freewriting session from last year. These are my unprocessed, undeliberated, and possibly addlebrained thoughts from a five-minute period last summer. By reading this text here you are agreeing to to click the "comments" link below and post a freewrite of your own within the next two days. Sit down somewhere for five minutes, take in your surroundings, and write without thinking, then post what you came up with. Should you choose to read on without posting a freewrite of your own, you will be breaking the obligation to which your reading and understanding this sentence has binded you, and that would be kind of a dick thing to do.

And now, here's some stuff I jotted down in a notebook last year without really thinking it over:

Dull drab Sunday afternoon. By the pond. Damselflies fan their wings and scuttle through the air in lazy amours. Dragonflies pursue dragonflies over the water in pointed, angled paths.

Ripples: fish from below or discrete drops from above, distorting the apparitions of birch leaves on the surface.

I toss a stone.

Ripples meeting ripples, ripples changing ripples. New thoughts impelling old ideas on new trajectories, old thoughts putting new ideas to harder scrutiny, redirecting each current even as its position becomes clearer.

Too much to ask for stillness. The birches stirring in the wind above, undulating in the pond below.

The dragonflies haven't tired of chasing each other yet.

A damselfly lands on my bare big toe.

Not Thoreau's sparrow, but a compliment is a compliment.

If you've read this far, you owe me five minutes of your own transcribed thoughts. Get cracking.