Don’t know what to write today? Try this.
Blank page, blank mind?
Blank screen and equally blank mind? This happens to me all the time.
Every day I sit, surrounded by writerly objects that dare me to despoil their pristine white pages. Computer screen in front with its blinking cursor harshly judging me. Notebook to the left of me. Notebook to the right. All of them mocking me with their faint grey lines and oh so clean surfaces.
So instead of writing anything, I head off into the internet and faff around until there’s no more time left and I have to sleep.
A while ago, while busily faffing, I read an article from Wait But Why about chefs and cooks. It was a bit of an eye-opener for me.
Chefs and cooks are metaphors, obviously. Believe me, I do not like to take singular food ingredients and combine them in any way, shape, or form. I like food, I like consuming food; I do not like making food. Tim Urban artfully showed me just where I sit on the spectrum of cooks and chefs as a writer.
I did not like what I found.
I found out that as a writer I’m not even close to being a chef. I’m apparently lacking critical thinking skills that people stole from me. And I never even knew they were gone! It honestly never occurred to me that I could take random things, combine them in different ways, and come up with a novel tasty meal.
But, while I don’t like making food, I do enjoy making stories or using words to find out what I actually understand and what I actually think.
Even after reading that article (which is very long), rather than magically becoming a productive creator, I’d still just sit in front of my computer, day after day, intimidated, not knowing what to write.
How do I start from scratch, what do I write, when everything that has ever been thought has already been written thousands of times by people more knowledgeable than me and posted on the internet for everyone to read? How does a chef decide what ingredients to try to make something novel (or a novel, in my case)?
As a writer, my ingredients are words. I just need to work out how to combine random words into something coherent (or tasty) and all my problems will be over.
But, how do I do that? Which words do I choose?
If I have to choose my own words, I’ll continue to sit here frozen, like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Having too much choice means I don’t choose anything, and it won’t be long before I notice my phone and the helpful messages on the lock screen from Facebook and Gmail and the other apps. My attention will be gone like a three-year-old racing for the playground.
Enter: Random Word Generator.
Random word generator spits out as many random words as you like. I’m not sure how random they actually are but it sounds like unrelated ingredients to me.
The first time I tried this, I decided to ask for 3 words. How hard could it be to create something using 3 ingredients, right? I got: Nightmare, Difference, Grounds.
Now, it’s not too difficult to construct a sentence that contains these words, but it won’t be very filling. It will be a snack that you forget two minutes after you’ve read it.
He walked the grounds, thinking about the difference between the nightmare he had and the very real thing that happened.
His nightmare included mountains of coffee grounds, which highlighted the difference in how much caffeine he thought he was drinking compared with how much he was actually drinking.
The difference between her nightmare and her normal dreams provided the grounds for her to decide she needed to seek help.
Hmm, I mused. These could be prompts for the start of a story. What was the first guy’s nightmare and what was the real thing that did actually happen? Did the second guy end up in hospital because of his caffeine intake, and did he meet someone there? What sort of help did the third lady need and why?
I stopped here for a bit because I wasn’t sure how these words would socialise in a tastier way. I went and did some other things that weren’t writing and let the words mingle and get to know each other in my head while I resolutely didn’t think about them.
Then I came back and sat down.
The result is this article. Not being able to write is a nightmare for so many of us. Grounds morphed into the playground that my brain heads for when it doesn’t want to do real work. The random word generator is the difference today between no words and all these words.
I hope I’ve found a way that works to nudge me ever so slightly along the spectrum in the chef direction. Maybe it will work for you, too.
Give it a go. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Go forth and word, and may you never run out of ingredients.
PS: The 3 words don’t even have to appear in the piece of writing. The important thing is the sparks the words generate when they’re rubbed together, and the resulting fire.
PPS: These stories might also form the basis for longer ones in the future.