Random Acts of Writing

Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.  -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

In graduate school, I found myself one evening in a workshop on writing for the theater.  We were to produce at least a scene, or, better yet, a short play, by the end of the evening.  The instructor (whose name I have forgotten) led us through a series of exercises to generate ideas, images, characters, and then set us to writing, with one provision:   every once in a while during the time set for quiet writing, she would speak - a phrase, a description of a sound, a character, an event - and we were to find a way to work whatever random thing she said into our scene.

I was writing a scene about a young woman trying to deal with the suicide of a friend, when the instructor spoke the word “parking.”   This spurred a memory of vaulting parking meters on hot summer nights with my best friend in high school.  We lived in a small town, and there wasn’t much to do, so we would run up and down main street, vaulting meter after meter until we were exhausted and laughing.  The scene I wrote that night sat in my stack of papers for some time, until, eventually, I took it out, re-read it, and wrote a poem based on it.  Eventually, the scene itself found its way into the novel I was writing (a requirement of the Creative Writing program I was in) which, later, became my first published novel.  (Two Mothers Speak,  Winston-Derek Press, 1996).  

In graduate school, I was of the opinion that I would become a writer of poetry or short stories, not novels.  I had no urge to write a novel, and worked for hours on my poetry, gaining praise from my advisers.  I went to the play-writing workshop not because I planned to be a playwright, but because I needed another seminar, needed inspiration, and it was the only workshop offered that night for writers - a random occurrence, a random chance.

Since then, in the teaching of writing, I have often used that instructor’s strategy in writing sessions - take the random, include it in whatever it is you’re writing, see what happens.  One student in a creative writing class came up with the perfect idiosyncrasy for a character she was writing - he compared everything to $700.  I.e.:   “That man is as ugly as $700”  or  “It’s colder than $700 in here!.”  Others found metaphors for freedom or love, hunger or loneliness, empathy or rage.  

I have learned to trust the random.  Watch, listen, be open, and pay attention to what happens within when you do.  At one of my favorite writing spots months ago, a song I hadn’t heard in years  - Spirit In the Sky -  came on the jukebox (yes, they still have those) and was the catalyst for identifying the central love in my character’s life.  Once, when completely stuck writing a scene with three people standing on a dark street corner talking, a walk by a fruit stand gave me the descriptor I needed for the night air they sensed:   it smelled cantaloupe-sweet, and the rest of the scene followed.

Chaos theory proposes (among other things) that patterns that appear random actually have a pattern, a design, a purpose.  As a writer, at those moments when the plan - the carefully designed outline or storyboard or sketch - fails us, if we turn from that information to the random, we may just find the very pattern our story needs.