Welcome to a very special edition of Shelf Life. Just kidding! It’s not special. It’s a very ordinary, not-at-all extraordinary, work-a-day edition of Shelf Life. I hope you like mediocrity because that’s what we’re having.
First, a little housekeeping on the subject of pens. I need to revisit my September 2020 article Pens I Have Known, because I have new and updated pen thoughts. New year new . . . pens. I’ve been doing a lot of hand writing lately, that’s why I have new pen thoughts. If there’s a pen you think I should try out before I write the update, please reply to this (if you’re reading as email) or leave a comment and I will give your suggestion due consideration before rendering verdicts. No fountain pens, please, they’re way too much work.
Second, regarding the title. My title capitalization rules include the following:
Always capitalize a verb in a title, no matter how short (eg, “To Be or Not to Be”)
Never capitalize a preposition in a title (unless it is the first or last word of the title), no matter how long (eg, “Alice’s Adventures through the Looking Glass”)
However, in today’s title, I’m using “turn on” as a verb phrase even though it’s technically a verb and a preposition. That’s why “on” is capitalized in today’s title. Nothing is done without a reason. Everything by design.
Now I return to the topic of handwriting, kind of. It’s all related. Everything by design.
I sometimes liken my brain to a tap that words come out of, words being water. Turn on the tap, words come out. Turn off the tap—we don’t actually know how to turn off the tap. This is an actual problem for me. I’ve begun writing Shelf Life earlier in the day than I used to, because after I get my brain into writing mode I can’t really get my brain out of writing mode and if I try to go to sleep while brain is in writing mode, I simply cannot. Instead I lay in the dark composing text in my brain till it overflows then I have to grab my phone to write it all down and this cycle repeats till exhaustion.
I’m working on some ways to turn the faucet off and will report back when I find this secret to being able to sleep.
Turning the tap on is another story. Writing Shelf Life turns the tap on but it’s not the only way I turn the tap on and I’m going to talk about that today. It’s good to have some tricks for turning on the faucet because this faucet—your brain—doesn’t start producing clean, drinkable water right away.
If you’ve ever been in a house with old pipes or whatever you may have experienced this, where you have to open the tap and let water flow for a bit because at first it comes out brown and gritty. Usually this is from rust in the pipes which is either a nice iron supplement or a tetanus risk, I don’t know which, or from other sediment in the water. You let it run for a minute till the water comes out clear, then you can use it.
Words are like this too sometimes—a lot of times—where they come out unusable for the first little bit before they start running clean and clear. A friend of mine refers to this as crawling through the river of—uh, excrement—to come out clean on the other side a la Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption (1994).
This is where the process of freewriting comes in. Freewriting is something you can do to turn the faucet on and let it run till the words coming out are clean and usable, and then switch over to writing the text you intended to write that day. So let’s talk about freewriting.
Freewriting
I’ll tell you up front that I’m not great at it. I like to go into any writing with a plan of what I’m going to write, and that’s not what you do when you freewrite. I also—and this is the editor in me—hate to leave an error standing. If I make a spelling error in when writing by hand I like to cross it out and rewrite it correctly. Freewriting doesn’t allow any of that. Nuh uh.
Freewriting means writing nonstop for a set amount of time (or—this is my personal rule—a set amount of space). That’s the whole exercise: Write without pause till you met the completion criteria. You have to keep writing the entire time (or till you fill the space) without pause. You should not correct errors. If you make an error, keep writing. If you run out of things to write about, just start writing nonsense words until you think of something else to write about.
The topic is unimportant in basic freewriting (we’ll talk about some other kinds later). You start with whatever happens to be at the forefront of your mind and just go from there. Switch topics mid paragraph. Switch topics mid sentence if you want. No one is going to read it but you and success is not determined by the coherence of thought, or neatness of handwriting, or absence of spelling and grammatical errors—success is achieved only by continuing to write until the end of the exercise. That’s it.
I already knew, from writing Shelf Life, that writing nonstop for a bit on any topic gets my brain primed to continue writing. The effects of it are so neat. When I’m “in writing mode” my brain composes my thoughts into text that I could write down. Even while having idle thoughts, I’ll stop and substitute cooler words for less-interesting ones, use juicier action words, and stuff like that.
Normal-mode thought: “time to cook dinner”
Writing-mode thought: “the time is nigh to muster our evening victuals”
I find myself in this writing mode most often when I’ve just finished writing Shelf Life or when I’ve just finished writing group, because those are the times when I am inclined to write nonstop for a set period of time. So I asked myself:
How much more writing would I do, how much better-written would my emails be, how much more organized would be my thoughts, if I deliberately put myself into writing mode at the beginning of each day?
This is the art of “morning pages,” which I’ve mentioned in Shelf Life before, for instance, in Five Writing Habits to Cultivate and in Don’t Overthink It. While I’ve recommended morning pages as an exercise, I have not always been great at sticking with it. I do it from time to time and then I get off track and quit doing it and then I get back to it after a while. At the moment, I’m on track. (I’ll be off again soon enough.)
Here are some tidbits I’ve gleaned in my on phases:
Freewriting is great to start the day because it puts my brain in writing mode early and I can leverage that throughout the day.
Freewriting is not so great if I leave it till bedtime because then my brain is stuck in writing mode and sleeping is hard.
When unsure where to begin freewriting in any given session, I start with any dreams I remember, or my plans for the day, or what I ate for breakfast. The topic is immaterial.
Although the goal is to put myself in writing mode, this exercise is also helpful in preparing for the day if I happen to write out my plans for the day ahead.
Take up freewriting and give yourself ten, fifteen, twenty, or thirty minutes as a warm up before writing and see if it doesn’t help you generate your actual writing writing faster and better than if you didn’t. If setting a timer isn’t appealing, you can do what I do and set an amount of paper to fill—I do a full page in my notebook, more if I feel like it. Doesn’t have to be paper, by the way. More on that in a bit.
Prompt Attention
My next favorite way to get the tap going is to tackle a writing prompt. I spoke a bit about writing prompts in Getting the Right Idea About Ideas as well as When the Muse Is Bad, so you can read more on the idea there (as well as here).
I hold an in-person writing group sometimes, and sometimes we begin with a writing prompt. The idea behind the prompt is you don’t know what it’s going to be (well, I usually know what it’s going to be because I supply the prompt for the group) until it is revealed to you and then you spend a set amount of time—in my writing group it’s 25 minutes—freewriting to the prompt. Freewriting again! Except this time there’s a topic.
The first rule of writing club is, you don’t talk about writing club. The second rule of writing club is, nobody has to write to the prompt if they don’t want to—anyone can spend that first 25-minute sprint writing about whatever they want, or otherwise working on whatever they want. Some folks do art. Some folks work on work stuff. “Writing Group” is not a commandment. I’m not the boss of anybody.
I’ve found, though, that when I do a prompt it really helps me turn on that writing-mode tap and spend the rest of writing group more productively. I have a love-hate relationship with writing prompts. I hate the idea of doing a writing prompt but then I find them actually really useful when I do one.
A prompt can augment your freewriting activity. If you want to try freewriting but you’d prefer a slightly more structured experience, try a prompt. The articles linked above contain, themselves, more links to various sources of writing prompts and I promise you can find an infinite amount of prompts that way. You can also try a “nonfiction” prompt by acquiring a random topic and writing your thoughts on it. For instance, you could try random Wikipedia.org pages to get a topic to write about, or you could try Lorem Picsum, which bills itself as “Lorem Ipsum for photos” and provides a random placeholder image each time you refresh—get a random image and use it as your prompt.
Tools of the Tap
As I alluded earlier, you don’t have to do your freewriting with a pen and paper—but you can, obviously. Let’s talk through some handy freewriting tools, both analog and digital, that you may want to use to test this out.
First, there’s the good old pen-and-paper method. Use your favorite pen (is it a Pilot G2?) that doesn’t smudge when you’re writing longhand—as a southpaw, the smudge factor is important to me. Paper is going to be your choice too but here are some aspects to consider:
A spiral- or perfect-bound notebook or journal keeps your freewriting together.
A binder (three-ring or otherwise) is infinitely expandable and easy to organize.
Paper with some kind of guides (rules, grid, dot grid, et cetera) is easier for longhand writing (in my opinion) than blank printer paper.
Right now I’m using an 8.5” x 11” spiral-bound notebook. That’s a nice, big page so my goal is to fill one page longhand without stopping. It takes me about ten minutes, I guess (I should time this exercise).
If you’d rather do digital freewriting, here are some things to think about:
Separate documents saved by date are easier to organize but you might prefer a single document with a new date-/timestamp each time you write. Even so, start a new document from time to time so it doesn’t get unwieldy.
The goal is to keep typing no matter what till your time is up (or till you hit your word or space goal) so you could try something like The Most Dangerous Writing App, which deletes all your progress if you stop writing before your session is up.
The last tool I use for this, since I’m working on paper, is a fun date stamp like the kind school librarians used to use to stamp the due date next to your name on that card at the back of your library book. I use this to put the date at the top of my freewriting pages, and also pretty much everything else I write by hand. I could write the date by hand, too, but stamping is funner.
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