Page Fright

A Fast Flow Writing exercise based on Chapter 24 of The Writer's Portable Therapist by Rachel Ballon.

"When I sit down and face a blank page....

I am afraid I cannot write anything original or thoughtful. I am a child having daydreams with prefab characters. And my daydreams are not only peopled by characters created by others, they are mere fragments. Nothing with a beginning, a middle and an end.

I am ashamed of my writing on a deep level. Not my writing, my daydreams that masquerade as potential writing.

I sit before the blank page knowing that if I wrote down what was inside me everyone who saw it would laugh. Too much of the real me is showing. And the real me makes people laugh and point.

I sit down before a blank page and I stop. If I write, all I can do is fill a paper full of my mistakes. Everything I write is a mistake because I am a mistake. I am not the femme little girl my parents wanted.

I tried to believe in myself but nothing happened. Is it not time to give up?"

Fast flow writing--- writing quickly and uncensored--- is a way to reveal the inner doubts and demons that may be inhibiting your writing. By bringing these things out in the open they have less power over you. OK, posting this private therapeutic writing exercise on my blog is probably bringing it too much out in the open. But I'll bet a lot of writers--- including better-than-me writers--- have similar inner thoughts.

An Exercise against Writer's Block

If you ever feel like you just can't write, don't know what to write, or don't feel like you write well enough to actually put any words on paper right about now, here is a simple exercise that may help. I think I got it from one of the books about writing by Lawrence Block.

Just take any novel off your shelves, open it somewhere, and begin typing the copy into your computer until you have the urge to alter, change and improve the text at hand.

I have done this at some length and it does seem to help, especially the part where I am moved to add my own take on the work I'm copying. I've changed characters from the ones in the text to ones from my own writing, and changed the setting.

A variation is to copy out first paragraphs from several different novels, and perhaps copying them and then creating altered versions of them. This is a great exercise if you have a hard time coming up with story-beginnings. Or do the same thing with dialog segments, descriptions, narrative-in-general, first person or third person, and so on.

One point--- most of the time you will want to be giving yourself examples that are good, but useable. So avoid Shakespeare or Chaucer for your model, avoid equally first novels and novels of less-than-average quality. You don't want to teach yourself writing mistakes, if you are like me you can do THAT quite well on your own.
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