Writing Game F I E L D WORK Go fora walk with your notebook and collect the following data two real overheard conversations three species of birds two brand names for food the words from six signs the name of one planet or star the name of a lipstick onetime of day the title of a book of fiction the title of a painting the name of a dead politician two types of onion and one type of potato the names of three items in a hardware store a make of gun and the speech of a child. Now, open a newspaper at random and write down one short phrase in it. This phrase is the title of your new piece of writing. Write a short story of no more than 500 words or a poem of no more than 40 lines that incorporates all the data you have collected. Revise this writing until the use of this data seems completely inevitable, and neither random nor forced. A I M Force yourself to make connections between disparate things, and your brain answers that pressure by making synaptic connections to make sense of them. This pressure, if applied constantly, will improve your facility with ideas, language and imagery. Force becomes habitability becomes facility and fluency. Fetishes of composition Writers can be ritualistic about when they work, and where they work, and this also goes for writing materials. Bruce Chatwin famously used a particular brand of moleskin notebook. The choice of what you write with is personal, but it is not inane. As with notebooks, writers can be fetishistic about the right kind of pen, pencil or keyboard. Thomas Hardy wrote each of his novels using a pen that he then had inscribed with the name of the novel (you can view them in a neat row in The Museum, Dorchester, England. Choose the tool for the job and stick with it, but try not to burden it with talismanic powers. What happens if you lose it, or it ceases to be manufactured Another excuse for the circular helplessness of writer’s block.
