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Writer's Block Buster
Copyright @1995 Alicia Rasley
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Here's an exercise sure to generate a page or two a day. All you need is your
writing tools (computer, pen and paper, or typewriter), a kitchen timer, a
phone, and a friend.
I call it the 10-Minute Burst.
1. Call a writer friend. (Local is cheapest.) :)
2. Each of you get set at the keyboard or paper.
3. Tell the friend what you mean to write-- "the beginning of the waterpark
scene," "the big fight."
4. Set the kitchen timer for 10 minutes.
5. Say "Go!", hang up, and start writing.
6. Don't stop to edit or fix typos-- just write.
7. When the alarm goes off, stop and call your friend back.
8. Exchange results-- number of words or pages.
I generally get a page or two done in this ten minutes. If I string several of
these together, I can get six or seven pages done in less than an hour! Now of
course, this hardly results in polished prose. Usually, in fact, there's just
dialog with the barest description and narration. But often within a couple
bursts, I can sketch out a scene that can be expanded later with all the fancy
stuff.
This helps me overcome my internal editor, that crabby crone who won't let me
write without immediately revising. The freedom from perfection lets my
subconscious roam a bit, and that often takes me to unexpected insights into
character and unforeseen plot events.
Most important, it forces me beyond my "fear of drafting" which has restricted
my daily output. If I can get a few pages written in a few bursts, I can
rewrite at my leisure (and I really enjoy the rewriting more than the
writing). I find this is actually a return to the way I wrote when writing used
to be fun. I write the "kernels" of scenes -- the fun parts -- rather than the
full scenes, so I don't get bogged down (as I have been doing) in the scene
openings and setting introduction. Now that I have a dozen or more scene
kernels, it's easy to see how to arrange and connect them.
Before I call my partner, I find it helpful to spend a couple minutes meditating
on what I want to happen in the passage I'm about to write:
"She's going to find out where the key is hidden and go to get it, but Bruce
will try to convince her it's too dangerous." This helps me concentrate on the
central event or goal of the scene. I also like to identify what the scene
conflict is. This keeps my subconscious from taking me -too- far off track!
If you're finding that your internal editor is leaching all the joy out of your
writing; if you think you write too slowly; if you want to write a "don't look
down" first draft without editing at all; if you want to encourage a friend to
write, try the 10-Minute Burst. Your reward could be more pages and more fun.
Alicia Rasley is a former board member of
the Romance Writers of America and the Rita award-winning author of GWEN'S
CHRISTMAS GHOST.
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