June 20, 2002 - Thursday

Making Contexts: A Game of Imagination and Writing, with No Rules
11:37 AM

I'm looking for comments, suggestions, and trials on a fun diversion.

There are no rules, but - as in all writing, even the most experimental - there are conventions to consider. It's not a blog. It's interactive, but it's not for conversation. It's for a more sustained type of focused creativity than most people normally pursue in their daily lives... even if it's only for five or ten minutes at a time. It's half writing, half thoughtfulness, half fun, half creativity, and half some other stuff. (Which only accounts for 250% of what it is.)
Choose an image. Click on it. Write. Aside from that, how you want to do things is up to you.

Don't get it? Here's some ways to play:

Speed Writing. Write for a set amount of time: maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Don't think, just write: as fast and as much as you can without stopping. If you get stuck, just type the same word or phrase over and over until something new pops into your head. If you want to, you can make a note of how many minutes the game lasted, if you cleaned it up afterward, or make other comments.

Flash-fiction, a.k.a. micro-, postcard-, quick-, fast-, short-short-, ultrashort-, skinny-fiction, among others. A story (with a beginning, middle and end) in less than 500 words.

Evocative Vignette. A short piece - no story line required - that evokes a feeling or image. (The line between prose and poetry gets very blurry about here.)


Responses - 8
     (Commenting has been disabled.)


cool.  me will need make time soon to play.

kv
Jun 26, '02 - 8:51 AM

something go wrong already?

kv
Jun 26, '02 - 12:28 PM

Not wrong, but not right.

Your two-timing host
Jun 26, '02 - 12:38 PM

my fault, so sorry

I'm more a a quip kind of guy; sustaining anything, particularly a train of thought, is out of my realm of possibility.  I'm out of the game.  Pumpkin eater.

But notice the carryover with the serene shot and the graveyard.  That was funny, wasn't it?  The whole foreshadow/backreference/dark humor thing?

kv
Jun 26, '02 - 12:51 PM

Yar, I got it, and appreciated the weave you made. Observational zingers and referential one-liners are a different kind of creativity, no less artful than longer stuff... but more valuable these days, maybe, given the ostensibly-declining attention span of the public at large. Which is why I'm trying to go the other way with Making Contexts, I guess.

As for you not being able to sustain a direction - I don't believe it. I've got copies of some great stuff you've written (somewhere), and I've long been jealous of its inventiveness. I guess maybe that kind of thing isn't as pleasurable for you, since it flows so easily.

Your control-freak host
Jun 26, '02 - 1:11 PM

gawd

kv
Jun 26, '02 - 1:28 PM

So...what happens?

rodney
Jun 26, '02 - 4:09 PM

Nothing. Not a thing. It's a pointless frivolity that I've squeezed all the joy out of. I thought you knew that about the things I do...

Your nothingness host
Jun 26, '02 - 5:12 PM








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