Storyworthy. Matthew Dicks

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СКАЧАТЬ process followed by actual writers, they speculate about strategies that might help a writer or follow the advice written in writing tomes by people who only write writing tomes, often doing more damage than good.

      When it comes to Crash & Burn, you must free yourself of this dreadful, hobbling, ingrained need to prepare and self-monitor. You must spill your guts on the page, free from judgment or worry about whether what you are writing is good or right. Just put the damn words on the page as they appear in your head and on your fingertips. Ignore your inner demons.

      Rule #3: You cannot allow the pen to stop moving.

      I say pen because, although I do almost all my writing on a keyboard, I have found that engaging in Crash & Burn with a pen tends to trigger greater creativity (and there is some science to support this claim). But if you must use a keyboard, go for it.

      Either way, your hand or fingers cannot stop moving. You must continue writing words even when your mind is empty. To make this happen, I use colors. When I have no other thought in my mind, I begin listing colors on the page until one of them triggers a thought or memory. For example:

       Red, green, blue, black, brown . . . I tell kids that brown is my favorite color, and it makes them all crazy, which makes no sense, but in truth, I have no favorite color, which makes them even crazier . . .

      Writing down numbers is also a popular strategy utilized by my workshop students, though I recommend that the numbers be listed in word form. For example:

       One, two, three, four, five . . . I have five fingers on each hand, and there are scars on five no six of them, which seems like a lot, but maybe not . . .

      I’ve known frequent travelers to list countries. I had a mechanic in one of my workshops list engine parts. I had a teenager in a workshop list the names of his previous girlfriends (and apparently had more than enough names to work with). It doesn’t matter what you choose. Your list of items simply needs to be long and familiar to you.

      That’s it. Set a timer for ten minutes, follow these three rules, and go.

      Here is an example of one of my Crash & Burn sessions from a recent workshop. When I’m teaching, I speak my Crash & Burn aloud as I write so my students can hear how my mind is working. Specifically, I want them to hear:

       • how new ideas come crashing in.

       • how I embrace these new ideas without hesitation or judgment.

       • how I am willing to leave a good idea behind in favor of a new one, regardless of how little promise the new idea seems to hold.

       • how I manage to keep my hand moving at all times.

      If you go to the StoryworthytheBook YouTube channel, you can see me engage in this process, speaking it aloud as I do in my workshops. But below is a Crash & Burn final product, transcribed from pen to digital text.

      I always launch my Crash & Burn sessions with an object in the room, but you can start any way you want. On this day, there was a bowl of grapes on a table, so I started with the word grape. Slash marks indicate the moments when new ideas or memories came crashing in.

       Grape. Grape juice. White grape juice / When I was a kid I stepped on a broken Mello Yello glass bottle and cut my foot — got infected — happened by a pond / oh, the pond, Yawgoog had three different waterfronts and Ashaway Aquatic Center — I never took / I was a lifeguard at Yawgoog — so boring so dumb to be a lifeguard at a Boy Scout camp — at least you give yourself a chance to look at girls but I saved that kid who couldn’t swim and didn’t want to tell anyone / when Eric and what’s his name? Rory yes Rory flipped their canoe adults facing away from pond and Jeff and I went to / a pirate is a criminal on the sea — I should commit a crime on the sea so I can be legally called a pirate / I was a criminal but if you’re found not guilty were you never a criminal or a former criminal? actually I was definitely a criminal: mailbox baseball and stealing the shoes lots of other crimes — isn’t everyone a criminal or am I just especially bad / list of crimes would be / story about a guy who commits a crime at sea just to be a pirate and wears an eye patch for effect / I used to walk the train tracks as a kid but I wouldn’t want my kids to walk the tracks even though it must be safe, right? how does a train sneak up on you? Not possible / nail polish for women has weird and crazy names maybe I could do something with it / green red yellow blue gray / The Confederates wore gray uniforms, right? Seems like the least inspiring color — British wore red to conceal blood and make fellow soldiers / I took that ASVAB test and would love to see the results — I had no idea what kind of job I might have landed in military — thank God I didn’t re-sign at 17 I wonder what / I took the pledge at 17 in a fake way and then had to take it again at 18 and refused thinking I would but does that make me a bad guy of some kind? / bad guy the black and the white is inconvenient Stephen King says that the side of the good is the side of the white which I like but sort of places it in unintentionally racist terms similar to “forgot the face of your father” is great but / haven’t read Dad’s letter yet why am I so scared all I want is a relationship and /

      Once I’ve finished with a session, I look back and pull out threads that are worth saving. Story ideas. Anecdotes for future stories. Memories that I want to record. New ideas. Interesting thoughts.

      Here is an annotated look at what I produced in those ten minutes:

       Grape. Grape juice. White grape juice / When I was a kid I stepped on a broken Mello Yello glass bottle and cut my foot — got infected — happened by a pond /

      I have no idea how grape juice brought me to Mello Yello, but my mind somehow made the connection, and it brought me back to a day of swimming with my family at a water hole when I was five or six years old.

      I had forgotten about the Mello Yello bottle and the cut on my foot until this Crash & Burn session, but more importantly, it brought back another memory from that day, not recorded during my session, because a new idea came crashing in, a much more meaningful memory than the one about my infected foot.

      It was a memory of my father jumping in the pond from the edge of a large, flat rock and remaining underwater for so long that I was sure he was dead. I was absolutely certain that he had drowned before my eyes. I remember a wave of crushing sadness washing over me, overwhelming me. My father was gone. The only man I loved was lifeless on the bottom of the pond. I knew in that moment that my life had changed forever.

      As I opened my mouth to scream, my father’s head emerged amidst a patch of lily pads, and “forever” had miraculously come to an end. Life was instantaneously returned to normal. Rarely have I experienced such an emotional swing in my life.

      It turns out that I have inherited my father’s ability to hold his breath for a frighteningly long time. Over the years, I have terrified many people, including my wife, by disappearing under the water for excessive periods of time, never once thinking about that moment by the pond when I thought I had lost my father forever. This is probably a story that I will tell someday.

       oh, the pond, Yawgoog had three different waterfronts and Ashaway Aquatic Center — I never took / I was a lifeguard at Yawgoog — so boring so dumb to be a lifeguard at a Boy Scout camp — at least you give yourself a chance to look at girls but I saved that kid who couldn’t swim and didn’t want to tell anyone /

      The memory of the Mello Yello water hole triggered memories of Yawgoog Pond, at the center of Yawgoog Scout Reservation. Yawgoog was the Boy Scout camp where I spent many summer days as a boy. The bit about the stupidity of working as СКАЧАТЬ