Wordlings

Mar 01, 2008 - 10:51 AM PST

The kind of writing I do is called "wordlings". Like "Peanuts", a name imposed by the syndicate which Charles Schulz never liked, the name is a bit cutesy for my taste, but when I came up with it I was in a cutesy place. Then it stuck, and now I've got a site with its name on it and it's my user name in various places, so I'm basically married to it.

Wordlings arise out of freewrites, which arise out of free-association, which arose out of reading a book by Ray Bradbury where he discussed notebooking and free-association as one of the keys of his everlasting flow of writing. And boy was he right. Like Bradbury or not, one thing you can't argue with: the dude was prolific as fuck.

So yeah, writer's block is pretty much a thing of the past for me. A bygone fancy, an indulgence of youth. I kinda have little patience with hearing about writer's block from others, though I understand that one can really seem blocked when there is an insurmountable hill of junk between you and the desired perfection which you want to emanate solely. Most people want to throb with scintillating prose right out of the gate, but this is a talent given to very few in this world (myself among them, so I know whereof I speak). But mainly I, and most people, tend to suck.

Suck! This is how you find your way through writer's block and get to the good stuff. Sometimes I think each of us writers have about 1,000,000 words of shit we have to get out before we can get to the really good stuff. Hey, try it sometimes...write a million words, and see if the million-and-oneth and beyond aren't noticeably better. Hey, I'll wait...

That's how I found my way through free-association to the way I write now, to my Wordlings. Wordlings are most of the time one-offs, written flat out in a white heat with little or no correction. They are not pondered over, nor preplanned, they just are. They just flow out. And I let 'em flow out, in whatever format that comes, and sometime with the errors and malapropisms left in, like skin on the french fries or a little bit of stubble on the face. I think we all know that a stubbly face has more character than a clean-shaven face, but most writers seem to want this really clean-shaven image, all smoothed out and buffed, with the flaws carefully concealed under a slatherment of pancake makeup.

C'mon, this is how you make a robot, this is how you make a clone, how you make a pod person, but this is not how you emanate originality, how you whip your own unique personality, which is really the only thing any of us have to offer anyway. If you're not whipping your own unique personality through your arts, whatever they may be, then...well, what are you then whipping? Some second-hand idea of someone else's third-hand idea of editorial perfection? Shit, no wonder writer's block is such a prevalent thing, especially among the young.

Forget about perfection...feel free to freely write crap. Chances are you'll do it anyway, at first, might's well embrace it! That's what's worked for me, and it'll work for you too.

All I really meant was to introduce my way of writing so that you wouldn't be shocked when you saw the weirdness I emanate, but...hell, I can't help it, I got me a public service jones. I am in that business, after all, of guiding writers out of the shadows. I'm just altruistic, I guess.