September 6th an exercise in free writting

Today I’m using some of the stuff we have been learning about in our creativity in business section to write this post so it may get a bit confusing and disappear at a variety of tangents at any moment, please bare with me. Every morning on waking up I am supposed to be taking 30 minutes to just write. There is no pattern definite goal of this writing, it’s writing for writings sake to try and get into ‘the flow’, as writers call it, when you are simply a conduit for the story to get onto the page. It is supposed to feel as if the story is telling itself and you are just a passenger. I can’t say that I have really experienced that just yet. So far it has produced a few stories that I quite like and other days I end up with a page of word vomit. Hopefully I manage to make some sense or at least be mostly coherent today.

I find it easiest to write about happenings that I have experienced in a very visceral way. I tend to focus on the details of what my surroundings were and try to build a sense of how I felt at the time both physically and emotionally. Some of the writing has attempted to use dialogue and I found this quite difficult to write. Details of what was said and intonation I find difficult to recall compared to how an experience made me feel at the time or how my body reacted to an icy cold morning.

I have found myself becoming very nostalgic at times looking back at places I have been and things I have now left behind. I have been surprised at how powerful the feelings of loss still are over my family farm which was sold five years ago. Writing about the farm and the wonderful experiences I had there has been surprisingly painful, knowing I can’t go back to the place that was always home to me.

This creative writing process has been an enjoyable experience overall. I have always enjoyed having a bit of time and space to be creative. I found the product development section of the Genesis project to be great fun and an interesting challenge. But I don’t have many outlets for this creativity, or more accurately I don’t make time for myself to be creative. This writing time everyday has really given me a structured outlet to be actively creative and it has been quite enjoyable. Together with the mindfulness work we did this section is showing me a clear need in my life for more creative outputs and I must really try to make time for these in the future.

I find it interesting that in this piece, a free writing exercise, I find my mind wondering to the need for more free writing exercises. Sounds like a bit of a feedback loop. It is true though, I don’t spend enough time on creative endeavours and if this short writing course can get me back to being creative then that’s a good thing. Well my little alarm to tell me that my allotted time is up went a couple of minutes ago so I’m going to leave it at that for now, until tomorrow.