OneWord

[I'm Murrin]

I was stumbling around and I came across this little website - It gives you one word, and sixty seconds to write whatever comes into your head when you see it. I thought it was an interesting little exercise.
From the site:

the real purpose of this exercise is to alleviate
our natural tendency to edit everything—and learn
to flow.

an analogy would be a film camera:
when a film is shot, the camera just rolls and captures
everything—good and bad. when all the shooting is
complete, the raw film is edited into a cohesive piece.

the camera operator doesn't keep stopping the camera and
rewinding and editing on-the-fly—the camera just rolls.
if it were to stop, some of the best performances
and spontaneous moments might be missed.

so:
be the camera. well, that's a stupid saying, but
you get the idea. in writing—just flow. go back later
and edit.

Here's the link:
www.oneword.com/

The word I got was 'bite', and I wrote the first thing that came into my head - a vampire thing (I may have been influenced by watching 'Fright Night 2' last night).


They also have similar sites for poetry, and picture captions.

[CovenantJr]

I like it. It advocates my approach (well, almost - in my case, go with the flow then don't go back and edit )

[transient]

Murrin, good get from that stumble. Had a run at it and drew a blank. Thing about all this is that having trod the path SRD pointed me down ...oh probably close to 25 years ago and then only lately working out the mysteries of forums ( forii?) and the like, catching this thread reminds me of all the notebooks I filled 40 years ago.scraps of words and the start of a great tome. Wonder where they all went to? Sort of like a jab from a sharp stick reading the things you good people put into the threads. Sort of like a cattle prod...perhaps goad is a more fitting word.

Back to the "one word". my word was "blank". had some fun and geez I can see the dust blowing away and there's some neural paths long untrod. I wonder where this one goes....?

[CovenantJr]

It's just like the kind of thing that goes on in my head all the time. A word, a phrase, a melody, a notion...I'm hit with a fragment that lives for an instant, then burns and dies. They can never become anything more than a snatch of something unseen, but they can serve as a kick up the mental behind.

[Avatar]

Just a thought Cj, but why not trying to apply it to poetry instead of prose/fiction?

That's what happens to me: A single thought, a line, a description that surfaces and appeals. The rest of the process is building a framework to showcase that line/thought/whatever.

--Avatar

[CovenantJr]

Trying to write poetry is like trying to build a functioning TARDIS. It's completely beyond me. If I try to write poetry, it comes out as prose anyway.

[Avatar]

Nothing that says it can't be styled as "prose" per se, but it eliminates the need for characterisations/plots/etc.

I've got some that I think of as prose, although they're not really. Will try dig one up to demonstrate when I have a chance.

Anyway, as I said, just a passing thought.

--A

[CovenantJr]

The suggestion is appreciated.

As an aside, have any of you read other people's attempts on that site? Some of them, I must aver in characteristically pompous fashion, are absolutely diabolical

[I'm Murrin]

Bump. For the NaNoers, this can act as a nice kick-start to get you writing on the spot.

[CovenantJr]

And I reiterate: Some of those attempts are horrific And that's after discarding all the ones that are definitions. Yes, defining the word is a great way of letting your creativity flow. Berks.

[I'm Murrin]

One of the entries for 'pushed' is just "me."

[I'm Murrin]

I've started playing this every day, making sure I remember by adding it to my bookmarks toolbar. I'm also allowing myself to loosen a bit, to be more flexible with my use of the words - instead of writing something which features the thing of the word, I write something related to what I think of when I first see the word - for example, for "brick", I had a man standing before the firing squad (the link came because he stood against a wall).