Wordspill: An exercise in motivation

Wordspill is a new literature group designed to offer motivation for any level of writer who wants to get words on a page. At the core of Wordspill will be a themed fortnightly activity. What is this activity? Read on to discover how we might be able to help prod those words onto the page.

Wordspills and Scrubups:

A lot of the difficulty in moving words from the mind to the page is in overcoming the self-editor within. If you've ever started a story without being 100% sure of where it's ending up, or even where the middle will be, you'll know what we mean. It's often the case that you might think an idea is too outrageous, or a character too wooden, or a scenario too implausible, and you'll scrap it without fulling exploring the possibilities within. Our aim is to flick off that little horned self-editor that sits on your shoulders and let you unleash whatever ideas you might have. How are we going to do that? Well, step one is 'wordspills'.

Spill it!

'Wordspill' is the name we've given to what you get when you write without knowing what exactly what you're writing. How do you do that? Simple!

Step 0) Make sure you have ten minutes free, you are in the right (write!) frame of mind, you are not on any instant messenger or chat programs, and you have non-distracting music playing. Basically make sure that you are in the best environment for you to let your ideas flow from your mind to your page.

Step 1) Open up Word, Google Docs, Notepad++, whatever your poison is for editing text. The only stipulation is that it must have the option to change the font colour.

Step 2) Change your font colour to whatever the background colour is (by default, this is usually white).

Step 3) Following the current fortnight's theme, write for ten uninterrupted minutes without changing the font colour back, highlighting the text to invert the colours so you can read it, or deleting anything. Basically, freewrite in invisible ink for ten minutes.

Step 4) Sit back and breathe a sigh. Maybe make a coffee, grab a biscuit. You have just completed a wordspill.

Anything from here on in is optional. The point of making a wordspill isn't to produce quality pieces of literature, but rather to convince you that it's possible to sketch out an idea, much like a traditional artist might, without fully committing the words to the story as they first appear. Now, what do you do with something once you've spilled it (if you're not a slob, that is)? You scrub it up! Here's how to take the next step with your wordspill.

Scrub it!

Step 5) Change the font back, and read through what you've put down. You might have surprised yourself with the volume, or maybe with how some of the sentences you thought weren't quite right actually ended up being pretty good. Gloat slightly if this is the case.

Step 6) Copy the wordspill and paste a duplicate underneath it. Now spend thirty minutes polishing up this duplicate. Repair those fragmented sentences, correct spelling errors, throw in a new paragraph every now and again if it's a wall of text. Extend your ideas if you want to, push that character just a little bit further. Essentially you want to let your self-editor back into your life to work its fussy magic.

Step 7) Once you've scrubbed up your piece, chuck both the wordspill and, if you've done it, the resulting scrubup into a deviation and upload it. Note ~Wordspill with your piece and we'll add it to our list to be featured in a news article every fortnight.

Remember the scrubup segment (steps 5 & 6) is optional, so if you don't want have the time or the motivation to spend polishing your piece, don't feel pressured. You can still send in just your wordspill to be featured.

Submit it!

Step 8) Now copy your original wordspill and its shiny doppelganger into a deviation and upload it. Note ~Wordspill with your effort, and we'll feature you in the next fortnightly news feature! Pieces do an especially good job of scrubbing up will receive honourable mentions, garnering you fame, hot men/women, and loads of cash. Well, perhaps not any of those things, but how does the chance to pick one of the upcoming themes grab you? Sold? Excellent.

REMEMBER!

There are no prizes for having the best piece. This is to motivate you and get those ideas out on a page. If you end up with something great, then so much the better!

Examples

We wouldn't leave you out in the cold with nothing to look at to see how it's done, would we? Hell no! In our gallery is a deviation with a few examples for you all to have a look at and get an idea of what it is you might end up with.

As you might tell from the examples shown, the wordspill/scrubup mechanism is more likely to end up producing the vignette form of writing (whether it's poetry or prose). Which is a perfectly fine thing to be! You can then develop these little vignettes into full blown stories or epics if you so wish. The important thing is ideas on pages!

Where to start

Our first theme is 'Welcome' and participants' wordspills and scrubups will be due on the 11th of August. Head on over to ~Wordspill to sign up to receive the fortnightly news announcements and ask any questions that aren't covered in our F.A.Q..

Thank you, and we hope to see you all producing some excellent spills!