A couple of nights ago I attended an online workshop on creative writing. Actually it was a taster for a language learning course rather than a gathering of writers, but that’s another story.
Towards the end of the hour the person hosting it asked us to write without editing and to continue for seven minutes.
As the minutes went by I half-formed an intention to ask ‘Why seven minutes?’ Why not six or ten or eleven. But that half-formed question was overtaken a more pressing question that came up in my mind, which was whether I could actually keep going for seven minutes.
The first three minutes were easy because I built what I wanted to say on top of what the instructor had already used as a piece of creative writing.
I could easily divert now and tell you what its strengths were and how easy it was to follow up on it. But that would take me away from what I am writing this for, which is what happened when I continued to plug away at writing.
It reminded me of what happens when I walk really slowly. When I say slowly I mean so slow that a person observing would wonder what this person is doing. So, cutting to the chase, the benefit of walking really slowly is that you start to see things. Look to your right and look up and look here and look there. It is special and I recommend it to anyone whether they have a purpose in mind (such as photographing) or not.
So.
So when I was writing and needed to keep going, I wrote all kinds of things that a minute before would not have occurred to me to write.
To fulfil the brief, the act of getting them down was more important than judging the quality of the ideas.
And it turned out that the ideas were certainly no worse than what went before. I went in unexpected directions and opened up the storyline in ways I had never imagined I would do – and all because the instruction was to keep writing – for seven minutes.
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