The syntax of ‘even though’ has forced me to add a second part to the sentence, which suddenly doesn’t just contain the images of darkness and of a drawing nearer, but also contains a lake, a silence, and me as the speaker of the poem. Now I’m not saying that’s a great line, but it’s certainly fuller than it was a paragraph ago. It’s an idea that demands to be completed: Even though the dark was coming in… what?Įven though the dark was coming in, I couldn’t leave the silence of the lake. It’s only half of a thought, and as such it leads us asking questions, wanting to know more. Is not a complete sentence in its own right. Instead, I’m talking about the phrases that demand a certain syntax, which in itself demands that you write more in order for the sentence to work as a grammatically correct sentence. I don’t mean those instances where you get so caught on the excitement and inspiration of writing that you can’t bear to put your pen down even though you’re desperate for the loo – though those moments can be very useful as well. Sometimes, you write a phrase that won’t let you rest until you’ve written another phrase. Either way, you’ll probably come out with some words / phrases / ideas that you weren’t expecting. You can use a line from someone else’s poem as a prompt, but of course if the freewrite does turn into a poem in its own right, make sure you change your first line, or credit the original writer.įreewriting can be useful in two ways: one is to reach past all the day-to-day fluff that clutters our brains so much of the time, and allow you to access the edge of the dream state that exists just below the conscious mind and the other is that you actually end up writing down all of that day-to-day fluff and clutter, but at least that clears it out of the way ready for you to move onto some other writing afterwards. Or another good exercise, when you’re feeling particularly creative, is to come up with a list of 5-10 first lines you could use for poems that you haven’t written yet, and then use them as the starting points for freewrites – one a day until you run out of first lines, and have to come up with another list. The hardest bit about freewriting is working out how to start, so it can be useful to have a stock list of phrases or first lines as a jumping off point. If you get stuck, write the first thing that comes into your head – even if that’s ‘I don’t know what to write about’. You can’t stop to censor yourself, so you just keep going. The aim is to just get words down on the page without worrying whether they’re any good or not. It doesn’t really matter what you write, and it certainly isn’t supposed to be a poem, or anything ‘poem shaped’. You don’t stop writing until the timer goes. You set yourself a timer (3-5 is probably a good amount, particularly if you’re new to freewriting), and you start writing. The idea is that you write without thinking too hard about it. I doesn’t really matter either way the point is the writing of it. Sometimes, the thing I write becomes the basis for a poem, and sometimes not. I tend to freewrite for 5-10 minutes at the start of a writing morning / writing day, just to clear away the cobwebs and warm up the writing muscles. So, to continue this possibly-a-bit-overplayed analogy: these prompts won’t tell you what kind of house to build, but they will help you create more (and hopefully better) bricks.ĭifferent writers use freewriting in different ways, but for me it’s a bit like practising scales on an instrument, or like doing stretches before a race. Language makes up the bricks and mortar of our work. (I may do this kind of prompt post in the future, but I’ll see how it goes.) Instead, each of these prompts is a way of generating material using the language itself. None of these prompts suggests a subject for a poem, or tells you what to write about. In the interests of balance, I thought I would write a post with some poetry prompts as well. Recently, I wrote a blog post sharing five fiction prompts, to help you get to know your character.
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