Streams of Consciousness

100m Freestyle

Writing is hard. The hardest part for me is simply keeping my foot on the gas. Resisting the urge to try and get every sentence right the first time. That need to edit as I go always dooms me in the long run. Throttles me to a crawl until my will gives out. But today was a little different.

I recently attended a workshop hosted by Edith Bow on steam of consciousness writing. The premise is simple. You come to the workshop with a fistfull of your favorite words, take three of them at random, and give them to another one of the attendees. That becomes their prompt and someone else's random three words become yours. Trade as many prompts with the other writers as you like, then piss off and get to writing. Write without stopping. Let whatever comes come and don't worry about the restIt was a couple days before I had a chance to sit down and give this exercise a try. I added a few additional rules for myself. Things I want to refine as I continue to do this more.

1. I set a fifteen minute minimum but no maximum. Fifteen minutes might not sound like a lot. Try doing a wall sit or holding a plank position for that long. Fifteen minutes is an eternity. No maximum because if I am on a roll why stop.

2. The clock starts the moment the pen hits the paper or the fingers hit the keys; however, I do allow myself time to reflect a bit on the prompt beforehand. As long as it’s only thinking and no writing. This helps me at least find a place to start.

3. I don’t have specific word counts I’m aiming for, I want the process to just be about training my mind to keep moving forward in the wake of self judgment. Stil,l I admit I have a soft goal of at least 100 words.

4. I allow myself one small edit when I'm done, just for grammar and spelling. It's hard enough to keep my fingers at the keys without stopping so why let something as useless as grammar get in the way.

Here we go.

This prompt comes courtesy of Zani D

Prompt: jerkwater, linkage, Dickensian

Time: 15 minutes

A man may run from The Almighty. Run until his feet bleed. Never finding a place to hide. Unless said man goes to Jasper.

Jasper lies somewhere near just the border of Texas, just on the Louisiana side. Nothing more than a waystation in the 1800s, an ember spit out of the crucible that formed that great pilgrimage westward, left to wither into ash.

In Jasper the bones whisper to you. You can hear them if you come up the red sand shores when the wind come in from the east. Folk in Jasper are’t exactly friendly but they’re liable to leave you alone, most of the time. Still, there’s always a story or two about some traveling salesman who is “just passing through” and never seems to make it home. “Jaspers got him”, they say.

The sky above the town always bleeds that pale red, like the sun forsook it, that gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach, when the church bells ring out.

In ‘79 rumors of a cult activity brought the state troopers to Jasper in the early morning just after the solstice. The Peoples Church of something or what have you was what they called themselves. The “Lamplighters” the local media got to calling them. Twenty state troopers went in that morning and Jasper burned and not a one of those troopers ever set foot outside the town again. The story went that they put down whatever was going on in Jasper but you try telling that to the families of those twenty men. They remember. How many kids in Louisiana grew up without their daddy? How many school yard stories did those kids have to try and spin? My daddy went up to Jasper and he died a hero fighting the devil.

Yeh something like that.

A man may run from The Almighty. He may run to Jasper, into the arms of The Devil.

Whew! This was actually pretty challenging. Like thoughts drifting during a guided meditation, I often found myself stopping for a second to think of a better word and needing to nudge myself onward. In that same vein it was hard to keep my train of thought in focus, hence stuff like “The sky above the town always bleeds that pale red, like the sun forsook it, That gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach, when the church bells ring out.” which really feels like two or three ideas I jammed together due to the pressure of the clock.

While I don’t think the quality of the writing is particularly great I am pleasantly surprised by the volume I cranked out. 320 words is way more than I normally get done in fifteen minutes and I think if this were a story I wanted to really flesh out, the bones are there to do so.

Who knows maybe I will make this a regular thing. See you in Jasper friend.

Thanks to Emil Ottoman will christopher baer Zani D C.J. Stockton Kristin Peterson Jon T Jimmy Gardner Justin Rosenthal Jessica W who also attended the workshop.