By: Carol
I so dislike how I have to start this after discovering that I am not the first person to use this term.
My mind has been "brainwriting" how I would attack this blog post before Googling it. Now that I have Googled it, I am trying to come up with a new term to describe it.
But this word so fits what I do to begin the action of writing — fingers on the keyboard, or pen in hand, staring at a blank piece of paper. At this moment in time, as you read this post, it is THE POPE METHOD OF BRAINWRITING. Ta Da!
This method refers to a common activity all writers do. Sometimes it's call "musing" or "brainstorming" or even "thinking". I choose to call it, THE POPE METHOD OF BRAINWRITING.
How Brainwriting Tells Stories
Now that I have brainwashed you into only using my method, I shall begin. Without our brains, we are just plain dead. We need them to survive on this planet we call Earth.
Maybe somewhere out in the far reaches of the Universe there is a place where creatures can live without one. They may have another organic device that helps them survive (Just another idea for our Sci-Fi writers). But here on this planet, it is necessary for most living beings, especially for those who write or tell stories.
Stories have been around since the beginning of modern man about 200,000 years ago. It's something our brains are wired to do. Why? I have no idea. It's just a fact of human life. The brain has been becoming increasingly complex over that time period and so have our stories.
First there were pictures scratched on rocks and in the dirt, then oral language evolved with sound being the mode to deliver stories.
The primitive pictures became simple symbols put together to create written language. Today, writers mostly use electronic devices to convey their stories. The best part is humans can share these stories.
As a Speech and Language Pathologist (say it three times fast), I learned that language and storytelling resides in the left hemisphere of the brain, in Broca's and Werineke's areas. If those areas have lesions or damage, not much storytelling is going on. (So if you writers fall out the window head first, let the right side hit the ground. Just sayin’.)
You Brainwrite Even When You Think You Don’t
I have struggled with writing stories for many years and probably will continue so, but my new conscious method of brainwriting has helped me considerably. I even count it as writing time. You know, when that writer friends asks you, "How much time did you put into writing today?" You may not have put one word on paper on or on the laptop screen, but you can say, "I spent two hours writing this morning and 30 minutes this afternoon."
All along they don't know you spent it pulling weeds or taking a shower. I heard of a screenwriter who had a shower installed in his studio office. He did his best writing scrubbing his pits in the shower. (This is my first blog post, BTW, in case you hadn't figured that out already.)
I just don't do well sitting down at my PC and set up a fresh blank Word doc and start writing my story. Forcing a story just leads to crap. That’s where brainwriting comes in.
The brainwriting process is easy and you have all done it, but have you consciously set your brain to visualizing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching your story? Seeing it all unfold on that movie screen in your head as you lie in bed putting yourself to sleep, immersed in the tub, waiting in line at the DMV, watching the ocean waves ebb and flow.
Brainwriting is the necessary and sometimes subconscious process that tells your story for you. It readies you so that when you place yourself at my storytelling machine, the words flow like molasses, honey, olive oil — you get the idea.
All my life I have been brainwriting, be just called it daydreaming. As a kid, it was creating adventures where I come out the heroine or get all the friends. Or creating vindictive stories to get back at my brother or others who had wronged me. This behavior continued into the teen years, adulthood, and now I “senior daydream.” I can't tell you how many Oscars I've won and how many times I've hooked up with Brad Pitt.
TMI?