Write Like No One's Watching

In my Write Right Now course we do a lot of in-class exercises where I’ll throw out a prompt and students have 7-minutes to write a complete story. It’s not easy. 

Last night one of my students asked how it’s even possible to write these somewhat longer, complete stories in seven minutes. She was having a difficult enough time setting up her story. Along with some of the usual tips I like to give (start with the third act or at least compress the first and second act into an intro sentence) I decided this was a good place to talk about one of my favorite subjects: write like a goddamn maniac.

I told her that the first step is to stop trying to write. I realize that sounds counter-intuitive, but “trying to write” basically means there are no “dogs” in your story, there are “mangy mutts with the smell of sardines on their breaths, one of them with flecks of feces caked between his front right paw.” 

No. In the first draft, they’re dogs. You can go back and make them whatever the hell fits your story afterwards. If you have ten minutes to write, you don’t want to spend nine minutes thinking about ways to describe a dog. If it flows, it flows. If the first thing that comes to your head is “dog,” it’s a dog. That’s it. 

Write like a maniac. Write like no one’s watching. Get the story out and don’t edit it in real time. I work with a bunch of cognitive psychologists at my day job. I was once told it’s actually impossible to multi-task and what we think of as multi-tasking is the act of switching back and forth between tasks without really realizing it. They explained it much better, trust me. Anyways, this can be applied to writing, too - every time you think, “That’s not the right word,” or, “That sentence was choppy,” or, “Man, I keep writing ‘he said’ and ‘she said,’” etc your brain switches from writer to editor and you lose your momentum. 

So write like a maniac. Write against the clock. Write like you’re up against a deadline every time.

One of my students had a great suggestion - he said that if you’re working on a computer you should turn off spell check. No matter how good you get at tunnel visioning, that red, squiggly line forces you into editor mode. 

I actually tried that last night and wrote manically. I wrote like no one was watching…although my dog was watching, tho.