Writing Exercise: Creative Vomit and Beautiful Words

EAL always does these little teaching moment things, which I think are super cool. Well, I decided to give it a try myself. The following is my greatest weapon against writer's block (aside from mowing the lawn).


Creative Vomit: The Ultimate Inspiration Tool

Today in creative writing we did one of my favorite exercises: stream of consciousness writing (or as I like to call it, creative vomit). For those who are not familiar with the term, stream of consciousness writing is a tool  to extract ideas from your brain. I think it is one of the purest forms of ideas and inspiration: raw and unedited, like the "unrated" versions of R-rated movies, only generally less crude (really, it's one of the stupidest marketing ploys I've ever seen, but, then again, I don't watch R-rated movies).

How To Do It

1. Find a quiet place.
2. Get a whole lot of paper or use a computer. You're going to be writing a ton, and you don't want to run out of paper halfway through a thought.
3. Choose a topic to start yourself off (for example, one of my streams started at autumn and ended at accidental homosexuality (It's not what you think! It's not! I'll put up the paper when I find it)).
4. Write. Write every little thought that passes through your head, no matter how weird, dumb, abstract, stupid, etc. etc. you may think they are.
        4.1. Set a timer. Don't lift your pen or stop typing until it goes
               off. Start small: 5, 10, 15 minutes is a good start. Once
               you figure out how it works, you can work up to longer
               periods of time.
        4.2. DON'T worry about grammar or punctuation or spelling.
               You can edit after the timer goes off.
        4.3. DON'T edit before you record your thoughts and
               don't edit until you're done. You waste time and ideas
               by doing that.
        4.4. DON'T look back at what you've written.
        4.5. DO go off-topic. If you stray back to your original topic,
               you're forcing yourself. Don't. Let your mind wander.
               Most of your good ideas will come about 3-5 minutes into
               writing as long as you let them.

Most people's streams look like a massive wall of text, but mine end up looking more like poetry. Every person vomits differently, so don't worry about making it fancy.

An Example of Stream of Consciousness Writing

My thoughts were pretty fleeting and I had to leave halfway through to go see my stupid school counselor (gr) to talk about a class that I don't want to take but my parents insist I do so I can get this stupid scholarship. (Try saying that sentence in one breath). Well, not stupid. I'm just bitter because the counselor wasn't even paying attention (she was unpacking a printer, I think), and I was on a roll in my writing! Don't you just hate when that happens?

Notice how sometimes my thoughts are coherent and sometimes not. Like I said: my thoughts were fleeting. Also, don't feel obligated to read the whole thing, as I have more to say at the end and it's pretty long and incoherent.

Did I mention it's incoherent?

and sometimes maybe then such so someday but not just today you joy yes because then tomorrow indeed inword if please

if i calm my mind i have nothing to say, no words tho think or thoughts to speak, not anything will come on the words or the p[age with be blank as my mind that’s not thinking, not a thing to be said, not a thing to be said, no thoughts to band e thinking or thinkings to think, void of void nothing there, no time to spare i must fill up the spaces with thinkings and places to roam far from home and certainly i am quite alone but it’s not something i mind, no, not at all do i mind being one of a kind, im just as good as i can be here yes

the birds did not cry out today
as though they had no thing to say
and the sun stayed low in the sky without a reason to pass through the highway is this the end?

sylvia plath i am not alone am i?

and tomorrow i have work to do
and
is my favorite word without end to the sentence and phrase and and and and and and

chillllllls
up my spine
can’t be min
but they are

how to write a sonnet what shall i do
i haven’t the foggiest,
no, i have no clue,
no, i haven’t the fogiest
can rhyme yes?

appease my diseased mind
no food can quench this hunger, no water slake my thrist, but first i must find these reasons that i’m not good enough in the first place
and if i were younger, maybe,
taller, thinner, stronger, quieter, healthier, prettier, doubtless,
doubtless i would love me
too

quiet as two am
sun syrup
my favorite thingsssssss

if i imagine then i am a celebrity in my own mind
mustn’t get caught up with myself

qwertyuiop is a word indeed

ther’s a certain slant of light i’ve been told that slants a certain way. certainly.

i am alpha so i think. i sure am glad i’m an alpha. white is such a pretty color.

listen to the camera flashes. I amd famous aren’t i?

alevoli

i could have olive oil if i wanted. olive oil and rosemary

what does the heart race?

my heart beats with a clockworktick

words want to be marriedtogether always indeed

inword and indeed

idon’t like hymns but i do love poetry
i love music but not singing
no

p l e a s e
and then
because

i am sick i am tired
yeah
carry me

poetry is not paragraphs but lines of literature

what is an illiteration?

i need to i need to i need to

oh what a thrill my thumb instead of an onion!
and my mind isn’t right

look at me look at me
repetitoin is so utterly important
why aren’t the important words repeated?

supercomma to the recue!

internet poets are doing it
wrong
like me.

i want someone to love meeeeeee like i do
please

just as things were geting good look who showed up to wrruin it all\

look at all that empty space on the page
it must be lonely
like me

fill me darling
with something
like sweet
or cool
fill me chilll me like your icebox, glacier cyhunks and bread hunks
hunkny
huny.

gills were made for breathing

poets should not take anatomy. you don’t speak with your esophagus, nor do men have breasts.

water breathing under it please surface little fish for you are dorowning.
no im’ not
i have gills and frills for swimming
do not save drowning fish from drowning
mister chinese man
writeen by a chinese woman

iiiiiiiiiii
staring eyes
on faceless ps and qs
are what exactly

look at creative vomit it still looks just like poetry
coming out of me
that kame out of my brain
my pretty little head
i can’t rhyme with dead or dying anymore
hackneyed, gross, cliched cliches

out of sight out of mind so they say
who they are?

and polluted

pinkies will be gone soon as well as feet and appendixes and tears

o brave new world with no people in it.
ione word is all it takes.

The Diamond in the Midst: Drawing Inspiration from Your Own Thoughts

So there's 30 minutes of stream of consciousness. The next important thing is to use it.

When you've finished writing for your 10-15 minutes, read over everything you've just written. If you typed up your stream, print it out. If you wrote on paper, obviously that doesn't apply.

Take a highlighter and find one, two, three lines that you absolutely love or can expand. I put the lines I liked (they're at the beginning of my stream) in bold. Pull them out and write again, but this time you are allowed to take your time and follow the rules of grammar and spelling (you're welcome).

The first line of my stream turned into this (also, no, the internet didn't mess it up. I formatted it that way on purpose):

The Most Beautiful Words

                                                p l e a s e
because then you AND i__________
someday AND

just m a y b e
because       then >/if/< we
AND \                    / indeed
        > tomorrow<

maybe then                                 such
s   o         |such|
maybe ////not////          TODAY

but then                            yes
            t  o  m  o  r  r  o  w AND sometimes
us

So there you have it: stream of consciousness, essentially. If you try it out, I would love to see your creative vomit (in part) and what you make of it! Email it, post it on your blog, whatever.

ROMance

What a day...

I woke up at 7:00 and rushed out the door to get to school before 7:30 (an obscene hour, if you ask me). Thankfully the girls I take with me found other ways to get there, but I still feel... well, dumb. I didn't even turn on my alarm, for heaven's sakes!

It's been a helter-skelter kind of day.

My brain is helter-skelter, too.

On one of the blogs I follow, the main topic of late has been the author's adventures through an online relationship. Ten posts long, so far, and apparently there's more. :O

Now this is, mind, a seventeen-year-old, in-the-thick-of-puberty-and-high-school take on things, but the only online "dating" experiences I've ever had were bad ones, as in a guy said he loved me and turned out to be a creeper, so I blocked him and moved on.

But can it really work? (eHarmony says it can, but you can't trust corporations these days.)

I find it hard to believe that you can really truly fall in love with someone over the internet. I can see how you could find someone of interest or someone you might like to take on a date, but love? I don't believe in it. There's something so intrinsically cold and unfeeling about internet relationships. I enjoy you, my readers, and all your jokes and feedback, but I could never see myself falling in love like that (especially not the ladies. Heavens, no).

But I do see the appeal. I like to think of my blog as "concentrated Alexa: all the opinions with half the obnoxious." My real-world friends can probably attest to this, except they all comment via Google Buzz rather than on my actual blog (I'm telling you, you guys are missing out by doing so. Just sayin'). So boys who would usually be repelled by my loud and wonderfully annoying personality might find me super appealing, attractive, and insightful (if I do say so myself) on my blog.

So, being the poet that I am, I wrote a poem expressing my feelings with more than a little alliteration. Admittedly, my favorite part of this poem is the title. Aren't I just... just so clever? You don't have to answer. I already know I am. }:)

ROMance

I don’t believe in love at first site.
I cannot discern personality from pixels,
Character from characters,
Or status from stat messages.
I find nothing exciting in email,
Attractive in AIM,
Or fun in Facebook.
I do not believe in e-harmony—
Or e-chemistry—
But,
Then again,
It’s never happened to me.

What about you, readers? Will you have an internet marriage, or a traditional courting experience? Do you use the internet for laughs, or finding your soulmate? Or flirting, for that matter? (Like those weird Zoosk commercials. Honestly, who actually does that?)

Ah, But There Are No Excuses For What I Have Done

All the same, let's not jump to conclusions.

These weeks preceding the start of school have been on heck of a ride, which is why most of my readers have assumed my death (well, so I assume). But as my seventh grade science teacher once said:

When you assume, you make an *** of u and me

 She swore in class, and our young minds were scandalized. To this day I have yet to recover....

She was kind of mean...

My past aside, I felt it only fair that I post something since I haven't posted anything for almost two weeks, I think. If I were following my blog, I would drive me crazy like that!

BUT FIRST I want to blab about school for a while, because reminiscing about seventh grade has put me on a tangent.

This being my senior year, I get to take fun classes! My schedule turned out great, because I have two hard and two easy classes every day. My schedule goes something like this:

A Days: Symphonic Band (because I don't practice enough to be in wind symphony, our school's top band), AP Statistics, AP Political Science (I must be crazy, but the subject fascinates me and taking it in college will be no easier), Creative Writing 2 (I'm Editor-in-Chief this year! Woo-hoo!)

B Days: AP Literature (I still haven't finished the summer homework... :O ), School Newspaper (our editor-in-chief isn't high this year (last year my favorite activity was listening to the EIC describe all the drugs she was taking and how she thought she was a rug once when she got high)), Cooking 2, Seminary (religious instruction, for those who don't know.)

And then there's marching band, which is a totally different story.

It was a long summer and boy does my brain need a workout! I'm taking AP Stats this year and our first homework assignment was to review some algebra II concepts. It felt like I was reading a foreign language! But I'm not worried, because although math is not my lifelong dream, it's also far from my lifelong struggle.

Speaking of homework, I need to wrap this up and chat about this in a different post, because I still haven't finished that math assignment or that summer homework.

I've deliberated about this for a while, as far as what to post, because I wrote quite a few things in the past few weeks and before that I never got around to posting. Naughty me... So as an apology for being so exceedingly tardy, here are a handful of poems on a variety of topics! Hooray!

Two Inches

The mind is an ocean about two inches deep
filled with fishes slipslidesuffocating,
mechanical spasms in the open air,
or rotting in a heap of twisted herringbonehearts,
blackblank eyes and
other suchthings.
 
The mind has storms above that shallow sea.
It reaches out coldwhitefingers
Among the half-rotted herringbonehearts
Still beating
Then lowlaughs fleeting down at me.
 
The mind is solemndark and gruesomegloom
Alone upon the sea-expanse
The corpses watch with mindless dread
As I give in, lay down my head
Slipslidesuffocating on the ground,
And with two inches wait to drown.

For once, I'm going to talk after a poem, because I didn't want to make you wait any longer. The first stanza was written on a day when I literally felt as though I was drowning inside of myself. I was unhappy and anxious and altogether not feeling well. The second and third stanzas were written during a late-night thunderstorm. Thunderstorms are excellent times to write because usually the power goes out and there's nothing else to do, but also because thunder and lightning are very emotional. In fact, if you think about it, a storm can express any range of emotion.

City Lights 

The fireflies blanketed cross the sticky flytrap strip greeted my glancing eyes.
I freed a few on my passing past by,
I wanted to watch them float,
Often alone, but sometimes in pairs,
Sets of lovebugs speeding on.
 
They stop for brighter lights than they,
And then go quickly on their way.
They’ve no time to thank me, no,
They’ve miles to go before they sleep,
And some their marital promise to keep.
 
I thought they formed fireworks on that formidable field
Of blackness. I find it strange that they would yield
Themselves up and stay there, stuck,
On the sticky stripe of dark,
Those orange-and-yellow fireflies,
 
Who pass me by, without a care,
Sometimes alone, but often in pairs.

I should have been watching the road more carefully, but city lights in the rain are so mesmerizing... (thankfully no one was on the streets when I left my friend's house on the eve of this poem).

Pool

 Blue chalk squeaks on the end of
A white pine pole leaves marks on
The cue ball clicks and rolls across
The green felt scarred and stained by
Cigarettes and coffee create a haze.
 
The balls clack together as
The game begins by breaking
The triangle explodes into a thousand colorful
Points are scored by
Sinking spirits as
Points are lost by
Scratching my initials in
The table.

 Fingers arched, I set my sites on
The eight ball thunks into the back left
Pocket filled with loose change for
The jukebox music joins the haze of
Coffee and cigarettes in the billiards hall.

I've never actually been to a billiards hall, but that's what the imagination (and movies) is (are) for! This is an older poem, but still a favorite. (I'm also not good at pool, but I can dream (and watch movies)...)