It’s easy to let our internal censor tell us we can’t or shouldn’t write about something or that what we want to write is ‘silly’ or ‘too much.’ Using randomness can help bypass the internal censor and get to the interesting stuff. In this post you’ll get three tools for introducing randomness into your writing: word jars, cut up technique, and ephemera.
I heard about a guy who had been widowed and was bringing up three kids. Things had been tough and a few years after his wife died, they started a ‘trips jar’. On slips of paper all four of them wrote down places they would like to visit, then they folded them up and put them in an old-fashioned sweets jar. When they had some time free at the weekend for a family outing, they would pull out a slip of paper and that’s where they’d go.
The thing about the trips jar was that all of the destinations on those pieces of paper were real places that they wanted to visit. None of them said ‘Neverland’ or ‘the moon’ or ‘a unicorn forest’. They were solid workable ideas in other words; that was the creative constraint, and the secret to making their trips jar work, while the random nature of the trips jar made it fun and engaging and sparked the kids’ imaginations.
The same is true when you use randomness in your writing. As well as the random element, you need a creative constraint, a framework if you like, the rules of the game that will make the randomness work.
I’m going to give you three ways to add some randomness to your writing but bear in mind that you need the creative constraint as well, related to your particular writing project. First, some warm ups.
Here are a couple of exercises to get you started if you’re not used to using randomness in your writing. They are great to come back to, and for generating source material.
Create a word jar or spark box. On slips of paper, write down random words, phrases, objects, places, lines of dialogue (preferably overheard somewhere), proverbs or aphorisms and place them in an empty tissue box or in the sort of candy jar described in the ‘trips jar’ example above. These boxes or jars of words and phrases are sometimes known as ‘spark boxes’ because when you need an idea – or a spark – you can pull out a slip of paper at random and use it. You could make one dedicated only to lines of overheard dialogue, or objects, or job titles, or places, or another theme. Arguably these more specific jars / boxes are more useful because they already have a creative constraint applied.
Cut up is an experimental writing technique initiated by William Burroughs in the 50s. You can read more about its history here. Here’s how you can use it to add some randomness to your writing. Cut out bits of text from newspapers and magazines. You could also cut up packaging and adverts. You can even cut up a draft of your own work as long as you’ve saved a copy. Spread the bits across a table or the floor and rearrange them to create new phrases and sentences. You can take pictures of these to use later or jot down what you come up with in a notebook. Combine the word jar and the cutup technique by saving interesting words, phrases and sentences to select at random later.
Everyday things that we usually throw away often have an interesting story to tell. Tickets, receipts, postcards, birthday cards and event flyers all count. Yes, the paper versions of these things are being replaced by the digital, but that doesn’t stop you from using them. You could make a list of ephemera and how it could feature in your work, or you could collect actual ephemera in a box with a hand-sized hole in the top for pulling out the contents when you need inspiration.
Let me know how you get on in the comments. You can read the next post in the series here.
More soon. Until then, happy writing,
Lou xx
P.S. If you’d like more tips like these, take a look at the Small Steps Writing Guides.