Thought Piece: To See Your Story Clearly, Start by Pulling the Wool over Your Own Eyes

First off, I didn't know that so many people write in such weird circumstances. I could understand pulling something over your eyes in order to imagine things more clearly, but writing on the top of a refrigerator is just weird to me. The whole write your first draft completely first, then go back and revise things (which is what the author said he does) makes complete sense to me. It doesn't make sense to rewrite each sentence over and over again until it makes sense, because that would take forever. The only time that would make sense is if you were writing in some sort of poetic verse, where the number of syllables count or something. Instead, get your ideas down first, then fidget with the details. I think when I write I usually try to do everything at once, which is probably a bad idea. If you try to perfect right away, you lose your fluidity.

Being blind would help because you aren't able to stop and reread what you have written already. In fact, I believe that the only time that rereading would be useful is if you stopped writing for quite some time and needed to refresh in your mind what had happened already. Even then, I think I would rewrite the previous sentence just to get back into the flow of things. By the way, I am not actually writing this blind. Instead, I am wearing a pair of gloves with the fingertips cut off so I can still feel the keys. I think I am going to start doing this for every essay I write from now on.

Some of the weird things people have been doing in this article sound kind of like some of the real hardcore sports fans do before a game to make sure their team wins, like turn around whenever their team scores a goal, or snort a chip if they get a foul (which I did just make up. I don’t actually know anybody who does that). Hey, it’s only crazy if it doesn't work. These writers do some crazy stuff, but if it works, then it works. If it takes me writing while I am upside-down in order to get an A on my next paper, then so be it.

One weird thing that I tend to do with my writing is write a first draft once, just to get an idea of what I want to talk about, then rewrite the first draft in an entirely different organizational way, so it flows better. I think of it more like brainstorming, then writing the first draft, but it could be more along the lines of writing a first draft and then revising it so that it flows better.

As for using real places as the basis for a fictional place, I have heard of that several times before. I don’t think that is strange at all. A lot of movies are based off of true stories, so why can’t places be? Why not characters? Why not?

And now I go into reorder mode, to put stuff that makes sense with the other stuff that makes sense with it with it, if that makes sense to you.