In my first aspects of writing post I explained what free writing is.
Free writing is writing without thinking and simply following the first random ideas, feelings or images that pop up in your mind.
When you do that you end up with a lot of nonsense and then you have to edit that nonsense.
How does one edit nonsense?
I have a lot of knowledge on this. I’ve been to the deepest pits of hell attempting to make sense of my own nonsense.
Hundreds of thousands of words of nonsense.
What’s the real trouble with nonsense? What makes it nonsense? What separates the sense from the non?
That can be the center of chaos. What can I do that makes actual sense?
If there is a path to total ruin how do I avoid it?
Most people free write to eliminate the blank. To get something down and achieve a level of impulse and free flow.
That’s what free writing does, it creates a mess of first impulses.
There’s lots of things in life that create a mess of first impulses.
Doing porn was one of them for me. Look at how weird that plot went. It ended up with me doing a film in France.
That film in France ended up with its own twisted and random little plots that created their own big mess of chaos.
Falling in love creates a big mess of chaos. Most of the things I have done in my life have been on the impulse of adoring a man.
At what point did I lose all sense and create chaos?
And I did create chaos. At a point in my life I was chaos incarnate.
The more chaotic something is the more complex the solutions are. And when solutions are complex they require a lot more time, energy and resources.
When something requires so much time, and so much effort and so many resources, what can happen is it all goes to zero before we get anywhere.
So what many people do in a highly chaotic situation is look for one big grand solution.
If one bill takes all your money and you still have ten other bills what on earth do you do?
The grand solution is to make a lot of money as quickly as possible that pays everything off in one swoop.
Free writing is a grand solution.
When I free wrote I could write between six thousand and ten thousand words a day. Most books are eighty thousand words.
Writing the length of books in two weeks or less is a very grand solution to wanting to be a writer.
But the main problem to grand solutions is they cost a lot. They can even cost everything.
When I was free writing I spent all of my available writing time writing.
None of it was spent learning.
None of it was spent being where I was at. None of it was even spent on trying to figure out where I was at.
I was just burning in the fumes of more and more first impulses until I spiraled into so much complexity that there was nothing left but gibberish.
How does one manage having so many unsolved problems that even selecting one to solve is a problem in itself?
Essentially how does one defeat chaos?
It wasn’t super fun.
With writing it involved figuring out where I was at. That’s very hard to do at certain point in chaos.
When there’s so much information to select from it’s very hard to determine what information has any value.
A long relationship with a friend is a very good example of how too much information becomes very confusing.
I had a friend for twenty years. We had a lot of fun and a lot of fights. What matters? The fun or the fights? In many occasions she was incredibly considerate towards me and the reason I had any hope. On many other occasions she was incredibly selfish and was the cause of my depression. These conflict. Which is true? What do I do? When do I end it when do I try more?
How do I figure out where I’m really at?
That’s what happens in chaos. There’s so much to see that it’s hard to see anything.
So being able to see is the first step.
In writing the first thing I tried to accomplish this was taking classes.
That did not work out so well.
Writing teachers are quite a bit like AI they want to tell you what you want to hear. They are pure and constant encouragement.
Which is bull crap when I’m trying to figure out where I’m really at and what the hell is really happening.
So then I moved into getting feedback.
Getting feedback was entirely different and much more vicious beast.
There are many sites out there that offer anonymous feedback from people with no experience giving feedback.
One of my favorite comments was ‘I got bored and stopped reading. Sorry.’
But that kind of feedback gave me a ground to stand on. It gave me a way to test things.
I got reactions to my reactions.
People started to point things out for me consistently and I started to understand I had blind spots. I didn’t know what the blind spots were but I knew they were there.
I could look for them.
Then I started giving feedback to other writers and the brilliant thing about giving feedback is I started to see other people’s blindspots and get a sense for why they have those blind spots.
Which made it much easier to start to sense my own blindspots.
And then solutions just started to design themselves. I realized what I could work on and then I worked on it. Got a bit better at it, not great just a bit better.
Moved onto the next thing I noticed I could work on. Got a wee bit better or perhaps not better at but at the very least developed a deeper awareness of why I was bad at it.
Then I’d move on.
Over time all the little improvements click into place. And suddenly I didn’t need grand solutions.
Because everything was ordering itself little by little. And little by little I have less problems, more time and more energy and a lot of the nonsense starts to wither, die and fall off on its own.
I still have plenty of nonsense clinging to me. It might take years or decade or to the end of my life for a lot of it to die.
I’m sure I’ll always have some nonsense and who knows what can happen in life. Impulses happen and chaos can start in ways I might not be able to imagine.
But at the very least I know when to stop chasing the grand solution.
Jess lanai 