Life writing

I recently attended another class hosted by Ideas Tap, this one focusing on life writing. My first assignment for my creative writing module is a piece of life writing so I thought it would be useful for that. I was wrong.

Not to say the class wasn't useful at all! It was, very, just not for my assignment. So what did I learn about life writing?

• Life writing is an opportunity to connect and share directly with readers or audience
• If it's good, people will see themselves in it
• The personal is political
• If things are well-crafted, they will have artistic merit
• Free writing* let's you say what you want to but might be afraid to admit
• You are not genre bound, you can add layers which help build the feeling of the piece

*Free writing is simply writing whatever comes to your head, without thinking, without stopping, without second-guessing yourself. There's usually a time limit so you don't just go on forever. Ours was something like five minutes and we were told to think about our week. I know I just said free writing is writing without thinking, but that was the exercise we did. This is mine (censored because I wrote some pretty arsey things. But I kept the lack of punctuation, the spelling errors and everything else authentic):

My Week

It went really quickly library books shelves the penis game Stef's red hair and Daniel's curly hair and us getting burritos at Westfield which was fun. That was monday. Then home and the cold and mindless hours in front of my laptop. The lamplight harsh on my eyes, I really should get the extended wear contact lenses like Sarah. I do think she's awesome. Today in the library was good, we sat in a circle, our whole group, not talking just working that's the kind of friendship I've been waiting for for 20 years. That's so long. Chessington on the weekend was fun and the fireworks at the end like they knew we were there. All of us standing in a line watching the booms in the sky, again not talking this is getting sappy like when Helena called me a sap earlier maybe I am a sap but I hide it well so that's okay. I'd rather pretend to be grumpy like Stef all the time but she's secretly really cheery which is okay and I like her sunglasses but it hasn't been that sunny lately so I haven't seen them in a while.

We also did an exercise where we had to write down a story we like telling as if we were telling it. I found it easy, probably because I don't really have trouble with character voice in writing, although I could see the merit of the exercise. That done, we then had to write down the same story but as a poem, and then as a script.

It was interesting to see what different forms could do to the same story and help you figure out what form works best. Personally, I felt the best form for my story was a combination of the three, which we also had to do in that exercise. You can try it out yourself if you want, it gets quite challenging - it made one woman in class cry.

My story that I like to tell is about how I once told a guy I didn't know my own name. I'll tell you about it someday.