I wanted to write an article about automatic writing. This is how it works. You take a pen and a piece of paper, and you start writing. The rules of the exercise are that once you place the pen on the paper, the pen must stay in contact with the paper the whole time. You are not allowed to stop writing at any point. You continue to write for the entire period of time that you set yourself to write without stopping once. You must write non stop. What does this achieve?
Well, the idea is to cut our conscious thought from what you write. After a while, because you have to just write whatever comes to your head, you can stop thinking about it and the words just keep pouring out. It is really interesting – and as a stream of consciousness writer I thought this might ne interesting to my readers. So try it! Put your pen to the paper, start writing, and do not stop for 20minutes, 30 minutes or however long you set yourself. I can’t stress this enough, the trick to doing this is to continue to write no matter what comes out – and don’t try to think about it. Whether you end up writing about team building events in Australia with talking kangaroos, or if in fact you end up writing complete nonsense it really doesn’t matter. After a while you will find the results more than interesting.
I did it once and found myself writing this weird sentence that didn’t quite make sense about a failed date that I went on years ago. It was something like “…Jo picked me up or I picked her up or there was definitely picking up going on, but it all went a bit crazy and I still can’t believe I went speed dating London is the worst place to try that kind of thing it was bound to end in tears”. It was only then that I realised that I was on some level still bitter about the way that the whole thing with her turned out. Knowing now that I was bothered by it, I’ve had a chance to deal with it and get it out of my system.
Try it! You may discover new things about yourself!
Auto

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.