Tuesday, November 16, 2010

This weekend I was introduced to the ten minute writing exercise as a means of uncorking the blockage that some writers go through. It was during the Fabulous Soul-O theatre workshops run by Tracy Erin Smith who is a great artist and a great teacher. The idea is to simply start writing and keep writing til the time runs out. Stream of consciousness, improvisation, call it what you will. You take a topic and just keep going until the 10 minutes runs out. The pen  keeps moving, the fingers keep writing for the duration, and when it runs out (the time) you stop. Some of what comes out will be crap (according to Sturgeons Law 90% of everything is Crap), but some of it might contain the germ of an idea, and some of it might be wonderful. I got some of each. It was enough to get me to enter the Fringe lottery. Something I haven't done in 14 years. Plus I figured that it was long enough from the last time that people would have forgotten.

     I'm at  a slight disadvantage here, because I'm a slow typist, and a slow cursive writer (my handwriting can be illegible if I'm in a hurry.

   By the way if you hadn't guess this one was about 10 minute timed righting exercises and time is now up...

Manana

1 comment:

Crooks said...

Hi Mike,

This is so cool. Do you think it would work for very amateurish (sp?) writers????
Tina