The Experiment Number One I Cthulu recently began attending a writing workshop in my school the program s called New Shoots and at the end of the year they take submissions from all the students in all the workshops in all the schools around here and publish them in a little booklet New Shoots How appripriate In any event these are writings from the first session (we meet for periods of 3 hours every two weeks) These examples were of being given a word or phrase told Go! and writing frantically for a set amount of time to see what d come out We were also given some tips on writing such as 1 - Don t let the monkey man tie you down (Wha ) The monkey man is the part of your mind that wants to go back and make everything perfect immediately The part that tries to produce completed products in one stage When you re writing in exercises such as these that is a great hindrance 2 - Keep the pencil moving If you slow down you might not be able go get back up to steam 3 - Make it interesting If you aren t surprising yourself you won t be surprising the readers And other such wonderful juicy quotes In these two examples I was given the phrases While running through Pacific Centre in my underwear and Cheese It is interesting to see how much yet how little one can churn out in what seems at the same time a pitifully small yet humongous amount of time Read on Timed Writing 1 - Session 1 3 minutes While runing through Pacific Centre in my underwear pursued by security guards I barely left a small slice of my conciousness open to go over the facts again which had left me in this situation It had started innocently enough pulling up parking even making a note of which of the many hallowed subterranean chambers my preferred mode of transportation a VW Beetle with actual patches of paint showing on top of the heavily rusted exterior was parked In any event I was here to exchange something Something so spectacularly ugly (time out stop here at some point in the future we might elaborate on these ) Timed Writing 2 - Session 1 5 minutes Cheese! she exclaimed with a hungry twinkle in her ravenous eyes I beg to differ Madam as I am not cheese but merely a related dairy biproduct So please I beg of you put away the crackers and rest a civilised distance from me that I might ferment in peace She slowed then ground to a halt losing the demoniac fire which had spurred her movements Most sorry she apologised pathetically I had mistaken you for someone else It happens all the time Just leave me be She wandered off to congregate with more of her fellow social butterflies Seriously some people have no culture unlike me I possess a veritably thriving culture of bacterium and related yeasts and fungi One would think it wouldn t be so hard to be a giant talking tub of yogurt (just enough time to squeeze that pun in at the end ) In any event for people interested in learning how to write stories novels or whatever or simply for a fun exercise get together one day with a bunch of pencils paper food and a timer and see what comes out Some of the results will be developable ideas Others will be crap But the process itself is great fun