If you’re in the mood for something a little different, you’re going to enjoy this. I’ve decided to dive into the creative writing exercises from this podcast series I discovered today entitled Writing Challenges, by David Morley. His podcasts are pleasant, due partly to his calm, faith-inducing tone and soft british accent involving the occasional pronunciation of “R” as ”W,” as in “cweative.” Morley talks about writing with the same recurring theme that acting folk talk about acting: this notion of conquering oneself. Somehow the ability to fight through and overcoming our own psychology and character is a prerequisite to producing good work. He tells us that we have to push through to perform beyond our own intelligence and against our own nurture and nature. As if ourselves are a barrier to our own creativity. Fascinating: I have observed the same concept as a basic fundamental principle in the domain of romance, one of may favourite topics: success in romance is often a function of suppressing our natural urges, because they tend to telegraph unattractive qualities; for example, the temptation to divulge too much, too soon.

Why would I play along with these games?

For one thing, I have a full month off and I’m not going to blow it just flaking out letting my brain decay. I’ll be keeping the creative capacity freshy fresh and putting it to work… through play. And publishing the process on this site (lucky you). Morley says that the playful challenges help to wake up to your own talent. But why games? I’m roughly paraphrasing him: creative writing is a process of working through challenges; and so the writing games simulate real writing through “serious play.” I really like that phrase, “serious play”. Technique and style are learned on the job, and so by playing, you keep your hand in.

The first writing challenge in the series is a warm-up. It’s a free-writing exercise that you can tackle daily as a means to develop your own ‘word-hoard’ (supply of your own special brand of language). It’s a bit experimental and the goal is to capture a sentence you normally wouldn’t in your typical writing process. Then you can take ownership of this unusual phrase, drop it into your repertoire for those times when you want to write something weird, I suppose. Morley says creating unusual phrases is part of developing “your personal linguistic energy.” I kind of buy that, but this exercise is a long and complicated way of going about that.

Anyhoo, this game goes thusly: go to a bookshelf, grab a book, close your eyes, open the book up and place your finger in it. Write down whatever word your finger landed on plus the 3 words preceding and the 3 words following it. Write the seven word phrase. Ok, sounds easy enough. I’m going to do this now.

Alright: I selected Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point“ and blindly opened to page 212 and tapped my finger about halfway down to the word “they.” Huh. Innocuous. The three words preceding are, “slightly cheeky situation” – hilariously delicious – and the three words following it are, “tweaked it. The…” – hmph. Ok, so my magic phrase then is, “slightly cheeky situation they tweaked it the.”

Alright. Ok, fine. Next, starting with the magic phrase, you have to write whatever stuff comes out as fast as you can for five minutes straight. Whew. There are only two rules: 1. you must not stop writing, and 2. you must not think. Must not think? This could get messy. But Morley would tell us that messiness is part of the whole idea of play. Play keeps us limber and play is not intended to be clean or artful. So that caveat out of the way, we venture forth into the experiment. Hold on, I’m first going to fix a snifter of Grand Marnier. Ok, here we go:

Slightly cheeky situation… they tweaked it. The sneaky bastards tweaked it to avoid having to face the consequences. The situation then became increasingly cheeky when I cheeked the cheek with ol’ Cheeky. He always knew how to party. But I guess the thing is that you never really know until you’ve tweaked it yourself. So perhaps I’m being too hard on those cats. I’ve tweaked. I’ve tweaked it many times. But always for good, not for evil. You can take the situation to a cheeky place but the trick is balance. It’s always about balance. If you tweak it too far the cheek goes all out to cheekidom and it loses it’s edge. Like a sexual metaphor that uses the proper anatomical terms. Why. It was good. You had the right amount of cheek and then flubadoo. It went to far. Beyond cheeky. Slightly cheeky is the optimal. The girls love it and the guys stay out of your way. If I were to write a fortune cookie it might have something to do with the wisdom we have discovered here today in this very paragraph. Another sip for warmth, but not thought. Hey no stopping, Mofo. No thinking either. Them’s the rules. I wasn’t stopping; I was just running out of material, like a killer whale at maximum speed quickly running out of ocean. It happens to the best of us. You know you got it when you can always remember the theme. Scheme or meme – was it a dream?

The 5 minutes are up. Finishing my drink now. Ahhh! Well, that was something else. Have to say that it was hard to write in advance of thinking. It was kind of a hurried mental state of getting down nonsensical randomness. But it does prove one thing: that I will publish just about anything. That takes courage, folks. So what now? The next step of this challenge is to read your mess forwards, then backwards word by word, looking for a phrase that possesses one of these qualities: it surprises you; it has never been written in English before (!); or that it has energy. The phrase must possess its own innocence. Hmm, intriguing, yet painful: to revisit some trash that you’ve written, that you’d prefer to just forget, but instead scour it for a unique gem. Sigh. Ok, ok, I’ll do it.

This is the phrase that I found: “thought not, but warmth for sip” (underlined, backwards above). It’s a bit mysterious. Sounds like it could be a slightly stiff, yet wise profound adage from a foreign language whose precise meaning is lost in the translation. “Thought not, but warmth for sip.”

Now to complete the challenge, you have to write a short story inserting the newly minted special phrase so that it occurs naturally, and does not feel out of place. What?! Short story? I haven’t written a short story since high school. Maybe even elementary school. That was thirty years ago. I instead offer something shorter:

“I can’t feel my toes. I’m losing consciousness. Johnson’s got the thermos. Fucker. He gestured a half-assed, insincere offer. I thought, “Not!” But warmth. For sip, for gulp, for taste. Just a taste. Anything to wake me up.”

Orchestra: ta-da! And that, ladies and gents, concludes episode 1 in the ongoing series or creative writing experiments. Hope you enjoyed it as much as me. More to come.