Writing motivation be specific
The third rule in the book Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life is in your writing motivation, be specific. The first example they give is don’t say car say “Cadillac” or whatever it is. It really helps to be writing with your hand moving and with the feeling of not being in control actually to make this rule of being more specific and easier thing to follow.
The reason for this is that you literally are tapping into your wild mind and your wild mind likes to be wild and get wild and say wild things. An
d when you are saying wild things you don’t just say go when you are trying to get a lover out the door that you are very angry with instead you might say something like:
Go! Get out of here! You’ve ruined my life! You and your conniving scheming backstabbing smarmy sneaking way of being that I had to discover the hard way! I hate the smell of you!
You get the point.
Let’s take a outer circumstance specificity sort of thing within writing such as describing something in a landscape or something in an interior room. You may find that when you are writing in the flow without control that a lot more of your visualizing mind kicks in also. You might think that you don’t visualize or you aren’t good at visualizing or you aren’t good at seeing images on demand, whatever, but how about trying a little exercise.
How About Trying a Little Exercise:
Let’s say that totally out of the blue you’ve been accused of murdering someone. You didn’t do it, but you did see who did do it running out away from the crime scene with the bloody knife still in their hands.
Now imagine that you are in the lockup and you get a session with your defense attorney who asked you this:
Okay you saw who actually did it what did they look like?
Well even if it was dark and you only saw them for a second then it would really be worthwhile and might actually save your life to move into the writing flow mode and you just let your answer flow to the attorney in a free-form sort of way.
Otherwise, they’re going to have to try to drag it out of you and they probably will give up pretty soon. If you don’t give specifics, if you say something like “He was medium height and wore dark clothes and I think he might have been white”, that doesn’t narrow things down very much does it? That’s not nearly enough for your attorney to go on.
What if, though, you close your eyes and cast your mind
back to that instant and you say something like:
He came running out the door. I saw something flashing in his hands – it was a long knife, but something was on the blade. It looked like he was trying to run fast but actually he was stumbling a little bit. Wait, he was limping with his right leg. He wasn’t just white, it was dark and I see now that there was really big contrast between his dark clothes and his white skin. He was really pale. But he wasn’t pale on top of his head so he had to have had hair. Now that I think about it, his head was not in a regular skull shape, it was bushy and lumpy looking. I think he had hair that was all teased up and wild looking.
And you could go on from there.
So so here’s the fun exercise for you:
Pick at least one person out today or even a few people and observe them closely enough where in your mind you had to be able to remember every detail about them possible in order to to describe them to your defense attorney. This is great practice with being specific.
Changing gears here, it also helps a lot with your writing motivation to be specific about what you are going to write about.
Writing for children is a perfect example of how being specific is not only beneficial but it is absolutely essential. With children’s writing you have to write for a certain age range in order to be able to effectively communicate and target your book or poem or song, whatever it is you are outputting.
What you would write that’s for a two to four year old is completely different than what you would write for a four to six year old.
Then of course there are the specific topics that you may decide to write on with commercial writing.
It can be a temptation to say something like “Well I will just write whatever I get paid the most to write about.” And it is possible to do that but if you don’t know anything about a subject then the subject is going to have to be researched enough to where you can write about it on a professional level which can take some time, before you can get to some meaningful specifics.
In any case, try the writing exercises in this post – pretend it is worth your life to be as specific as possible.
This is a great thing to do, a quite practical skill, actually, in your writing and in your observations to be specific. Police are used to being quite disappointed with their eye-witnesses – you can be the exception and it could very well keep you out of hot water some day!