Dear Diary,
Free Writing is an exercise for writer's who need to keep their brains in shape. It's pretty easy. To begin, you have two choices:
1. Directed free writing.
2. Open free writing.
If you chose the first, (Directed) then you need to have a jumping off point. It can be anything you can base writing off of, which incidentally is anything. I like to use quotes, philosophical questions, questions about myself or my family, and sometimes I just use a single word.
For this first free writing, I used a random word generator which can be found here:
Then, you take ten FULL minutes, (no breaks) and you write about whatever it was your jumping off point was. If you did this say, once every day, you would find that over time it becomes easier to just sit down and write. Your brain is a muscle. You have to use it so it will become stronger!
However if you wanted to do "Open Free Writing" you simply sit down with a piece of paper in front of you and start to write about the first thing that pops into your head, again for 10 minutes.
I think free writing works best if you do it with a pen and paper, because you aren't supposed to stop, erase, or really fix anything. You are simply supposed to write. For me to post my free writing up here, however, I do have to type it. I'll try to resist the spell checker.
Okay so for my first free writing, I got the randomly selected word: POLICE.
Here's what I came up with:
Max sat on the hard wooden chair in the kitchen his eyes glued to the table top. The tension in the room was so thick the air seemed to be polluted with a poisonous gas. His mother sat at one end of the table, huddled up in her chair, she looked as if she was trying to make herself small enough to disappear altogether. All around the room red and blue lights flashed from the police cars outside. Somewhere outside Max’s father sat in the back of a car his hands cuffed together. Flashes of the fight kept attacking his inner eye, making him flinch violently.
“Ma’am, My name is Officer Kently, we’re going to need you to answer some questions. Do you think you can handle that?” The voice of a female police officer said somewhere behind Max’s back.
Next to him, he heard an audible release of air from his mother. “Yes, I-I think I can.”
“Good. Was this the first time your husband has hit you?” His mother hesitated. “Ma’am?”
“No. No this isn’t the first time he’s hit me.” His mother said at last, her voice shaky and quiet.
“Have you ever reported him being violent before?” Asked Officer Kently.
“No, he’s never been so…enraged before. And... He’s never hit Max before tonight.” At this, Max touched his face where he could feel the swelling of what surely must have been a large black eye. He looked up at his mother tears welling in his young eyes. She looked at him, her heart break at his pain plain in her brown eyes.
“How old is your son, ma’am?” Continued the officer.
“Nine.” She replied, reaching out her hand to touch his. “I’m so sorry, Maxie. I’m so sorry.” Her face broke then and fresh tears ran down her cheeks. Max stood up and went to her, wrapping his thin arms around her neck, holding on tight.
“Can you tell me what the circumstances were for the outburst?”
“I had just finished cleaning up after dinner when Rick found the vodka I hid from him in the back of the cupboard under the sink. I had told him that I had knocked it over accidently and it had broken. He was furious.”
“And why did you hide the bottle from him?” asked Officer Kently, taking a seat where Max had just stood up, placing her notebook on the table and scribbling down her notes. Max looked at the questioner for the first time, sizing up the small woman in the blue uniform. Her blonde hair was pulled back tightly from her face in a ponytail. She looked kindly at Max as his mother answered.
“He is an alcoholic, and gets enraged when he’s drunk. I was tired of Max being scared of him. I figured that if I hid the bottle, he wouldn’t drink for a few days, and he would remember what it was like when he was a real father.” Max hid his head on his mother’s collar bone. He breathed in her calming scent deeply, and she pulled him up so he was sitting on her lap.
“What happened after he found the bottle? What did he do?” Said Officer Kently, writing down even more notes.
Max hung onto his mother as if she were a life saver on a wild tossing ocean, tightening his arms around her as the scene played out in his mind in a horrifying clarity.
“Linda! What do you think you’re doing?!” Yelled Max’s father, causing Max to whip around in his seat at the table, forgetting his bowl of i.....TIME!
And that's free writing!
With love,
Mara
