Daily Free-write

About the Free Write Prompts

Keep in mind the following two hints when you want a topic for free-writing or for your poems:

· The student poems are good examples of topics – use those.

· The poems I read or use in the Unit lectures are good examples of topics – use those.

About the free-write exercise, this works best if you do it daily or almost daily. It will not work if you try to do it right before writing a poem. The writing will be too fresh; writing like good soup needs to sit for awhile and mellow.

You may write using a pad and pen, notebook, or on the computer. I think it is a personal choice. There is a theory that writing by hand with a good pen on paper that you like frees up the creative side – I don’t know if this is true or not, but the choice is yours.

Directions for the free-writing prompts:

· Find a quiet place to write where you can free associate for about 5 to 10 minutes

· Do not allow outside interruptions – don’t answer the phone, turn off the TV, don’t answer the door, etc.

· Choose a topic – most of the topics should make you remember an image or scene. You’ll write everything you can remember about the image or scene.

· Write the topic at the top of the page

· Consider the topic for about as long as it takes you to write it down

· Then begin writing anything that comes into your mind about the topic, or how stupid this exercise is, or how you really thought this class was going to be easier, or how you need to remember to get milk…

· Remember to write ground your images in the senses

· Do not, I repeat, do not worry about spelling, grammar, line breaks, or anything during the free-write, that only slows the writing process for you – if you find that you start worrying about these things, you have turned on the editor

· Time your writing – use something that beeps so you do not have to keep watching a clock

· Stop writing when your time is up.

Free-write Topics

· Finish this sentence, “I remember…”

· Write about the first house that you remember living in.

· Write about sunlight coming through a window on a winter’s day.

· Write about your personal landscape – where you’re from.

· Write about your ethnic history.

· Write about the color black.

· Find something in the paper that gets your blood boiling and write about that.

· Write about the heat.

· Find an article in the paper that moves you and write about that.

· Write about a scene in movie that has moved you.

· Write about being – male, female, old, young.

· Write about your favorite toy when you were a child.

· Write about an animal that you might be if you were an animal.

All topics may be repeated as needed. The memory is layered and as you write you remove layers – going deeper and deeper into your memory.

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