Word exercise...or whatever

Tonight I was making dinner, rather late, and my mind was half on the task as I was wanting to write something...anything. I have found that is the worst time for me to try writing so far in my sort writing career (right). Normally I need to write and it flows, wanting to write is different. So I thought I might try a little experiment.


I grabbed the nearest piece of paper, it was actually a full sheet of lined paper, a novel idea for me as most of my paper might be an envelope, the back of some cast off homework sheet, torn bottoms of grocery lists...you get the picture. So, pen in hand, think of something to write... dinner being on my mind I start with the first three words then walk away stumped and disappointed.


Food, taste, sweet


Well, I was munching on a carrot stick, stands to reason. Wasn't what I anticipated so I rolled with what I started, word association, at least words that come to mind perhaps without real association. I decided to see how many lines I could get before repeating a word.


solitude, in-attention
tension, strength
weakness, numbers
packs, herds, meat
milk, pudding, dessert
meal, breakfast, sunrise
light, shadows, dreams
nightmares, horror, monstrous
waking, noise, blaring
traffic, flow, colour
red, blood, war
poppies, fields, running
moving, stretch, weight
metal, iron, rust
age, time, father
family, dogs, food


It was over too quickly. I was interested to note that the first word was also the last word.


Once I got to traffic I forgot that I started with food as re-reading for reference between tasks only extended to the immediately previous line. Dogs, you would have to know our dogs and their rabid fixation with food...almost nasty...but they are fun little dogs when they are not eating. We have a pug and a not pug. These are not you standard pug style dogs though, they are very lean.


I am not sure this was productive but I do see some interesting themes, even if only a few words that perhaps could be the idea of a poem.

This reminds me of some of the silly things we did in highschool for creative writing...of course none of them made sense at the time, or perhaps I just wasn't interested.

For the record, I don't plan on posting all exercises I might do, I just thought this one was new to me and perhaps novel. Actually, writing exercise for the sake of writing is new to me. I have tons to learn I expect.

Final insight:

After jotting a tidbit about dogs and food I notice that I have entire paragraphs behind every word or related group of words that were there when the word was placed on the page. Now I truly see the power of words, they tickle memories and tease them out when you have no idea what the memory might be even though they may have been the reason for the word to appear in the first place.

All of a sudden I have much to say about this but no time to do so. Life gets in the road once again.

Jeff.