Some writers love to freewrite. (For those wise enough to have avoided an introduction to freewriting as yet, it means keeping the pen moving, no matter what, and amazing yourself—or boring yourself to tears—with the crazy stuff that pops out.)
Generally freewriting accomplishes nothing for me but a few paragraphs of, “I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to write.”
I stumbled upon my college freewriting journals today and discovered I wrote about a funny, overweight high school cartoonist who’s been voted Mr. Preference even though he didn’t get asked to the girls’ pref dance. He also lives in a haunted lighthouse and thinks the ghost is a beautiful woman—the only beautiful woman he’ll ever be close to on account of his exceeding obesity.
And also, the ghost stole his rubber ducky.
I’m pretty sure this came from one of Louise Plummer’s zany writing exercises involving random photos cut from magazines that we had to turn into a story. I probably selected a picture of fat Far Side cartoon characters and a duck.
Freewriting makes me nervous—not only because I hate writing crap but also because it’s almost frightening when something foreign or bizarre turns up in my notebook. Case in point:
5/6/01
As Rain rounded the rock outcropping, she was startled by an unfamiliar shadow. When she realized it clung to the feet of a stranger, it was too late to back away. The man jerked in surprise when his bloodshot eyes found her, but a smile spread across his stubbly face.
“Hello, little lady.” His voice was rough from decades of cigarette smoking.
“Hello,” she croaked. She looked at his rust-eaten truck.
“What’s a cute little girl like you doing in the middle of nowhere? What are you, eleven?”
“Fourteen.”
The man leaned on the stick he was carrying. She looked closer. The stick was a shovel. The man ran his tongue over mossy teeth as his eyes followed her figure from head to toe.
Rain took a few steps backward, suddenly sick.
“Where you going, sister? Are you scared of me?”
“N-no.” But she turned to run.
The man grabbed her and yanked her against his body. “You’re not going anywhere, little sister.” His foul breath tickled her ear.
“Let me go,” she sobbed. “My father will come looking for me. I always come here. He knows that.”
It was a lie. No one knew about Secret Cove.
“What’s your name, sweetie?”
She was crying too hard to speak.
“It’s a simple question. Don’t you know your own name?”
He dragged her toward the beat-up truck.
“Is it Allison? Is it Linda? I knew a whore named Linda.”
The truck bed was filled with coiled bungee cords, a few shovels, and a rolled tarp. He gripped both of Rain’s wrists in one hand while reaching for a bungee cord with the other.
“You just wait here while I finish a little chore,” he said. “Then we’ll go for a drive, you and me.” He spun her around to face him, still holding her wrists. She saw he had dropped the shovel near her feet.
“We can’t have your daddy finding us, can we? Daddies hate their little girls running off with older men.” He began wrapping the cords around her wrists. “Besides, I never leave two bodies in one place.”
The graying desert swirled as Rain’s eyes fixed on the rolled tarp. A faint shape seemed to emerge beneath it—a faint, human shape.
I ask you—WHAT THE HECK? I do NOT write crime thrillers. I don’t even remember writing this.
In case you need to know how it ends, she pukes in his face, which I’ve heard can be a great distraction to potential attackers. It works, she grabs for the shovel, and knocks him out with it. The most disturbing part? Even though I have no recollection of writing such a twisted scene, my first novel involves desert scenery and a character who uses a shovel to knock someone out.
Was I nearly murdered as a child? In the desert? With a shovel? Or did I just really love Holes and I subconsciously want to take it to a new, psychotic level?
Before this gets any weirder, let me just say I wanted to post about the benefits of freewriting—that’s what I was getting to—but I’m out of time. So maybe you can tell me. Does freewriting help you? What’s the strangest story idea or scene or sentence to ever find its way onto your page during a freewrite (if you dare share)?
4 Comments
June 30, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Love this post!
I don’t find freewriting helpful. More often than not I end up writing, literally, “blah blah blah blah.” I’m not good at spur-of-the-moment creativity. I admit though, I haven’t tried this in a while, and I know it’s very helpful to many writers. Maybe I’ll give it another try.
July 1, 2009 at 9:05 am
I hate freewriting. It’s a huge waste of time for me.
July 5, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Nelson Edward Merrill Moench was a boy as awkward as his name. He was tall. And, amazingly, he was also stout. He had skinny arms and legs, where his muscles and joints looked more like mosquito bites than anything human, but his torso was think, soft, and pudgy. He didn’t know about matching colors. He didn’t even know about matching seasons.
Yesterday, July 4th, 2009, he was wearing brown denim shorts with a purple, gold, and green Utah Jazz sweatshirt–the real classy kind, straight from 1993, with Karl Malone airbrushed on the front in vivid three-dimensional glory. He topped of the ensemble with an orange hunter’s knit cap.
Nelson Edward Merrill Moench, or Nerm, as most people called him. Didn’t have an ounce of red, white, and blue in him or on him, until he met Sally Jo Ross.
She was a girl who, strange to say, looked like a slender apple pie, smelled like barbecued hot dogs, and knew how to keep a baseball box score. (She even knew the difference between a forward and backward “K”)…
[That was five minutes worth for me--though I will admit I did go back and correct spelling and grammar. Thanks, Kim. That was really fun and I hadn't done that since Freshman English at BYU.]
July 6, 2009 at 9:22 am
Ha! Great freewrite. I can see it works for you. Thanks for sharing.