Leaning over the quarterdeck, and looking down the...

Good Advice.

Ten Minutes! Go!

Here are the essential rules that are often formulated for the beginners or students, often a paraphrase of Natalie Goldberg’s “Rules for Free Writing.”

* Give yourself a time limit. Write for one or ten or twenty minutes, and then stop.
* Keep your hand moving until the time is up. Do not pause to stare into space or to read what you’ve written. Write quickly but not in a hurry.
* Pay no attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation, neatness, or style. Nobody else needs to read what you produce here. The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.
* If you get off the topic or run out of ideas, keep writing anyway. If necessary, write nonsense or whatever comes into your head, or simply scribble: anything to keep the hand moving.
* If you feel bored or uncomfortable as you’re writing, ask yourself what’s bothering you—and write about that. Sometimes your creative energy is like water in a kinked hose, and before thoughts can flow on the topic at hand, you have to straighten the hose by attending to whatever is preoccupying you.
* When the time is up, look over what you’ve written, and mark passages that contain ideas or phrases that might be worth keeping or elaborating on in a subsequent free-writing session.
Via Wikipedia

Notes

June 26, 2008

Leaning over the quarterdeck, and looking down the railing at Jeremy Jacobs, Braided Bill sneered and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “That little one has no idea what he’s in for,” He muttered to his Mate, the capable but shifty man of 25 who he’d sailed with since he first set out a privateer some number of years prior.
“Yessir,” said the ever agreeable bosun. “He ain’t got a clue.”
Braided Bill smirked and reached into his pea coat, found his pipe, and placed the mouthpiece between his lips. He couldn’t light it, not in the misty breeze on the quarter deck, but holding the ebony stem in his lips and inhaling the musty burnt smell of the bowl gave him comfort, and eased his restlessness enough to give his plan a good mulling over.
For his part, Jeremy Jacobs was sitting on a cask of salt-pork, watching some of the lower ranked crewmen taking in some of the wet night air. “The difference,” explained a particularly knotty old crewman to Jeremy, “between the air out here and the air below decks is the peculiar lack of death about the air up here.”
Jeramy watched the crewman nodding at him, waiting for some kind of response from the youngster, but Jeremy just stared absently at the man.  This sucks, he thought. This sucks sucks sucks sucks. A pirate’s life indeed.