Give it a go. You never know.
Sitting there with a blank page open on your screen and your mind equally blank? This happens to me all the time. I even have nightmares about it.
Every day I sit with blank pages surrounding me, daring me to despoil their pristine white pages. Computer screen with blinking cursor harshly judging me. A notebook open on my left. A notebook open on my right. Both mocking me with their faint grey lines and oh so clean surfaces. So instead of writing anything, I head off into the internet and faff around until there’s no more time left and I have to sleep.
Last night while faffing I read an article from Wait But Why (BTW this is now my favourite blog ever and is responsible for me not writing anything yesterday) about chefs and cooks. It was an eye-opener for me. Chefs and cooks are metaphors, obviously. Believe me, I do not like to take singular food ingredients and combine them in any way, shape, or form. I like food; I do not like making food. Tim artfully showed me just where I sit on the spectrum of cooks and chefs as a writer. I did not like what I found.
I found out that as a writer I’m not even close to a chef. I’m apparently lacking critical thinking skills that people stole from me. And I never even knew they were gone! It honestly never occurred to me that I could take random things, combine them in different ways, and come up with a novel tasty meal.
Rather than creating, I just sit here, day after day, intimidated, not knowing what to write. How do I start from scratch when everything that has ever been thought has already been written thousands of times by people more knowledgeable than me and posted on the internet for everyone to read? How does a chef decide what ingredients to try to make something new?
As a writer, my ingredients are words. I need to work out how to combine random words into something coherent (or tasty). How do I do that? Which words do I choose?
If I have to choose my own words, I’ll just sit here frozen, like the proverbial deer in the headlights. It won’t be long before I notice my phone and the helpful messages on the lock screen from Twitter and Facebook and Gmail. My attention will be gone like a three-year-old racing for the playground.
Enter: Random Word Generator.
Random word generator spits out as many random words as you like. I’m not sure how random they actually are but it sounds like unrelated ingredients to me. Since this is the first time I’ve tried this, I decided to ask for 3 words. How hard could it be to create something using 3 ingredients, right? I got: Nightmare, Difference, Grounds.
Now, it’s not too difficult to construct a sentence that contains these words, but it won’t be very filling. It will be a snack that you forget two minutes after you’ve read it.
- He walked the grounds, thinking about the difference between his nightmare and the very real thing that happened.
- His nightmare included mountains of coffee grounds, which highlighted the difference in how much caffeine he thought he was drinking compared with how much he was actually drinking.
- The difference between her nightmare and her normal dreams provided the grounds for her to decide she needed to seek help.
I stopped here for a bit because I wasn’t sure how these words would socialise in a tastier way. I went and did some other things that weren’t writing and let the words mingle and get to know each other in my head while I resolutely didn’t think about them. Then I came back and sat down.
The result is this article. Not being able to write is a nightmare for so many of us. Grounds morphed into the playground that my brain heads for when it doesn’t want to do real work. The random word generator is the difference today between no words and all these words.
I hope I’ve found a way that works to nudge myself ever so slightly along the spectrum in the chef direction. Maybe it will work for you too.
Give it a go. You might be pleasantly surprised.
