Between sleeping and waking

I wrote this during the morning as a kind of 'morning pages' free write hybrid. I imagine as the course progresses I'll do more of these diced and spliced jobs. I need to remind myself that the course means nothing without the writing, the actual writing. I don't really want to do the minimum just to get through the 9 months or so and score an, admittedly useful, 60 points. That's just part of the story. If I'm honest the last couple of courses that was exactly how I approached them, do enough, no more. As far as this one is concerned it's about taken the skill of the writer to another plane, to a marketable level instead of just a hobby or distracting pastime. It's actually more important to do do well than to bluff it if you see what I mean.

Anyway, this morning's hybrid:

It's happened again. Desperately trying to silence the din. It's a fire alarm or something and it's making me feel desperately uncomfortable. I don't know why. It doesn't feel right. It's too shrill, too incessant. Must. Make. It. Stop. Through the fug of confusion and agony, I see it. There it is, the bell, and there's the button that will stop its ringing its dinging - I can't conceptualize the word because its hurting, it is somehow drilling into my head, deafening me, driving me half mad. I'm pushing the button -'no response'. I find levers, I pull on them, they come off in my hand - still the infernal noise. It's seems to be in my head now. I cannot make it stop. Over there, a hammer. I'll break the thing, then it will stop, It'll have to stop when it's broken because it will simply cease to be. I take hold of the hammer and club the bell and all its connections, I smash it into fragments - I'm swinging this hammer like the God of Thunder. Still it rings. It persists. I take hold of electrical wires and forgetting all I know about the dangers of live electrical wires, so mad I now feel, I start to drag them out of the wall, my hands now hold great clumps of coloured wire,fizzing, the stench of smoke filling my nostrils my hands sizzling, and still the noise, the noise the noise, the NOISE! I see myself - as if standing on that bridge holding my ears like that character in the Munch's Scream, and I'm about to throw myself over it before I open my heavy eyes and see, the alarm clock. Ringing. Plaintively telling me to silence it, telling me to please get up.

A walk for my mind

The other thing I'm struggling with, if I'm honest, is the idea of the notebook. I fully understand how vital taking notes is, but I never seem to have the damn thing with me, or a pen, or the pen doesn't work, or the notebook is with me but its now bent/broken/pages falling out, or the pen has snapped leaving my clothes and parts of me covered in ink - you get the picture. So today, I took my customary walk on the beach, just a few meters from where I work and armed not so much with a notebook, but more of a notebook mentality, as discussed and encouraged somewhere in the BRB.

Pretty soon I noticed that in places, the damp sand - the sea, having moved out, looked flat and smooth but with a hint of grain, like wood. Like pine actually, or light oak. I looked at it closer and it looked almost like tanned leather - the 'grain' in the sand caused by the swirl of the retreating sea made it look 'hide' like. I looked further along the line where damp sand met the dry, where stones had been deposited, washed and abandoned and noticed an appearance and texture that reminded me of flattened cake mixture, patted and rolled - each stone either a currant, a sultana, or a raisin. Further along the shore little semi circular holes appeared in the sand, in straight lined sections which at times looked almost like a succession of kitchen cheese graters, all lined up. I would never have made that comparison had I not 'looked' as hard as I did today. And I thought, I don't have a notebook, but I have a little internal recorder in my brain if I remember to switch it on. If. I. Remember. To Switch It On.

Freewrite Exercises

Just added a handful of freewrites to this blog which I have brought over from the OU blog. The spelling mistakes, lack of paragraphs and grammatical eccentricity are entirely the fault of that site which has refused to help me in those areas. And I'm so lazy I've cut and pasted them in pretty much as they were.

Freewrite

I can't help but notice that all my free writes so far have been anecdotal based. Does this mean that they aren't real free writes? I fear it may. Therefore if I begin this one with a course prompt and go straight in it won't be. Will it? Anyway.... I was on my way to the car park when...I noticed that three nuns including the nun driver, were making a hash of parking their 1972 Triumph Herald in a slot that frankly would not have received my 1996 Smart car which to the uninitiated is only a snit and spit-squirt bigger than something that would have come out of the Matchbox factory circa 1968. It's not as if the Triumph H is a big car. On the contrary size was never its abiding feature. It was much more style - with its innovatory bonnet, 'up and there's half the car pointing towards the heavens' - Good heavens. Good Heavens dude where's the (front end) of my car, sounds like a bit of a cut price film title for a cut in half car. The nuns, it should be added were all fine when they emerged blinking into an unsuspecting car park. Once they'd squeezed themselves from the doors. One of them it has to be said hadn't seemed to have kept any food denial Lent asceticism for quite some time, if she was a chocoholic or a pie eating champion before last Lent, I think it's fair to suggest that she is one still.

Ends. I never know how long these free writes are suppose to go on for. The length of this one is fairly typical - but I can see the worth in keeping going for the greater likelihood of the nuggets that are suppose to reveal themselves as you go along. I read earlier today for example that one person sets his store out and writes for about an hour. I don't suppose it's Chekhov when he metaphorically puts his pen down, but that isn't the aim of the exercise. It's more an exercise of the imagination and if I - as I seem to - put too much store on it being readable, grammatically sound, spelt more or less correctly, a buffed and almost finished piece by the time I get up - this may not be a good thing for the raw creativity purpose for which this exercised has been devised. Then I'm pleasing no one. How are we supposed to sieve out the dust heap to find the diamonds if they've already been located, polished and sold on before the work is done. How in fact can we disinter the golden nuggets that may pop out from a torrent of water that has sunk every stone in the vicinity into the earth. We need that big splash and the gurgling mud, and the shovel and the sieve and more water - what we're looking for is hidden. Its often the fact that it's hidden that makes it worth looking for. And look I've ended a sentence with a preposition which for this exercise is a marked advantage.

Another Freewrite

Just noticed that the book is asking for three or four. Damn! Ah well...'The truth is'... I really didn't want to buy the Dark Aubergine Ford Mondeo that was sat gleaming in the showroom during the month of November in the year 1996. I mean the car was nothing more than a revamped Sierra and they were driven by reps and grandfathers only. I was barely 35 years old. Too soon to put conventionality before style. Too soon to come over all pragmatic rather than outrageously stylistic, there was after all a lovely little Alpha next door. Probably breakdown every five minutes, but what style you can break down in. And consider what kind of a bird you're going to be standing on the roadside with - thanks to being an owner of an Alpha Romeo. Pragmatic? Go hang. Give me uncertainty. Keep your solid reliable hunk of boredom for your pots salesman's and Sunday driving 70 somethings - I'm not ready.

Done. In one lick. A lot of it is true too. But am I doing this right?

Another Freewrite

Just noticed that the book is asking for three or four. Damn! Ah well...'The truth is'... I really didn't want to buy the Dark Aubergine Ford Mondeo that was sat gleaming in the showroom during the month of November in the year 1996. I mean the car was nothing more than a revamped Sierra and they were driven by reps and grandfathers only. I was barely 35 years old. Too soon to put conventionality before style. Too soon to come over all pragmatic rather than outrageously stylistic, there was after all a lovely little Alpha next door. Probably breakdown every five minutes, but what style you can break down in. And consider what kind of a bird you're going to be standing on the roadside with - thanks to being an owner of an Alpha Romeo. Pragmatic? Go hang. Give me uncertainty. Keep your solid reliable hunk of boredom for your pots salesman's and Sunday driving 70 somethings - I'm not ready.

Done. In one lick. A lot of it is true too. But am I doing this right?

Freewrite Exercise

Utilizing the first prompt given to me by the course book writers, and playing the game of not taking pause to consider today's prompt is: 'that smell reminds me of'... 'The time I suffered the insufferable and excruciating embarrassment of being scrubbed clean in a cloakroom Belfast sink by the headmistress of our school after I had lazily defecated during a storybook reading whilst sat under the school willow tree in the spring sunshine. I'm sure the experience wasn't a memorable one for her either - though no one asked her to attempt this task in the full view of a passing form of children filing in from the playground on their way to lessons. If she felt bad, is it possible to even guess at how mortifying the whole experience was for me, even if I was only five years old and recently had been of an age where frankly these public viewings of my naked body were of no considerable moment? And the smell! a blend of watery excrement and carbolic soap mixed with the kiddie sweaty gym shoes assembled in rows beneath the clothes pegs. And the omnipresent disinfectant of the cloakroom which had recently been attended to by the cleaner caretaker who had been pressed into service after yet another pupil had urinated on the floor with fear having entered the school via the rear entrance which was located close to this Diabolical Belfast Sink.....'

Done. Though I did have to revisit as there were some awful spelling mistakes and laughable typos. But this was a first hit from the keyboard with no preparation. Somehow I don't think I'll be doing too many of them by hand, handwriting always wrecks my fingers. The problem I have now is whether I should open them up for other students to see. Frightening when you don't have the safety blanket of the constant revise. What crap is this? people will say.

Freewrite

Breaths. *Flexes fingers* *Cracks.* 'It surprised me when'... I walked to the beach the following morning after our midnight arrival to our apartments in Crete. I expected golden sand, or sand at least. I expected to see people sat on the sand - with row upon row of multi coloured parosals lined up like regimental guards, with the occasional one recumbent, like regimental guards parading in the beating sun. I didn't expect to see stones, and jetsam and a solitary dog walker hunched over against the wind mournfully watching his dog snuffling around the sand like a truffle hunting pig. And no one in the sea. No bobbing heads and shouts of glee and splish, splash splosh and the pock pock plop of bat and ball. Just a lone bouy, bobbing about like the bloated corpse of a failed channel swimmer.

Done in a hit. One typo. Corpse became corpose which I don't think is a word. I won't do any more for a bit. Looking at the book information this is what I should be doing: 'we permit ourselves to associate freely. Write down the first words that occur to us. Then what that makes us think of and following the train of thought wherever it goes.' Hmm, mine so far stack up as little descriptive stories and perhaps lack the freedom that I should be showing. Anyway it should...'take you into your deepest ideas, feelings and memories.' These can be developed in your work. So we'll see how these go as the course progresses

The Writing Course

I have begun this blog to help with the writing course I have just started with the Open University. Not writing a blog hardly feels like a serious option whilst on a writing course so here I am, on Blogger. Or rather back on Blogger, as I have dipped in and out of Blogger and blogging generally for the past ten years. And they're still out there, the old blogs, somewhere out there, whereever it is old blogs go to die. A bloggie graveyard perhaps. Anyway, I don't intend for this one to be put to rest for a while. Today, after all, is its birthday; and it should be alive until at least the end of this A215 Creative Writing course. More of this later.