The point of pointless writing
My motto: Nothing need be wasted *PLUS* A great technique to kick-start your writing if you're stuck
What’s the point of doing exercise or yoga? The answer is, usually, to keep yourself generally fit and toned up. Unless you’re preparing for an athletic event, there is no specific or direct point to any of it.
I think we need to keep our “writing muscles” toned up as well. Given that a writer is, by definition, someone who writes (as opposed to someone who just reads or thinks about writing), it’s important to keep writing even when you have nothing in particular to write about. Or nothing ‘important’.
For instance, the writing produced by using Oulipo techniques is often apparently pointless — the word stands, after all, for the workshop of potential literature. But it’s good for writing muscle toning.
Or sometimes writing anything, even if it’s inconsequential, can be a useful stimulus.
As an example, a couple of month’s ago I came across my response to an exercise given in a creative writing class. That led to my writing this article about my father:
Bravery
My father died on the 26th of December, 1976. An incident “This should do it.” My father was responding to my mother’s growing exasperation with the two-year old me constantly getting under her feet in the kitchen. Dad was a handyman of sorts. There were drawers full of watch parts from watches he’d taken apart but not quite reassembled. If you say …
My current notebook is full of unfinished snippets of writing, some of which I think are, frankly, rubbish. But one of these days I may draw on them for a larger piece, in which case they will have proved not to have been rubbish after all.
Here’s a little exercise you might like to try, in order to get your creative juices flowing.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Eclecticism: Reflections on literature, writing and life to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.