Lazy writing.

Posted on April 1, 2008 by

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I started this blog almost four years ago as a way to regularize and improve my writing practice. You know: just me and my personal thoughts (and the rest of the world reading them). And why? Because I largely need an audience to motivate me – whether that is work, music, writing, or pretty much anything else – something in my psychological make-up demands it. (And believe me, I have enough insight at this point to know where that particular quirk likely came from).

I feel like I’ve achieved some of what I wanted through blogging. My writing has improved, I am a lot more confident about it and I have been pretty constant in this space. But I’m at the point now where I’m not pushing myself much, or at all – and not only does that make for an uninteresting blog, but it also fails to serve my purpose of being a better writer – and in particular a better story-teller.

So I am proposing to myself a couple of exercises in this space over the next little while. One is to resurrect the one-word essays I wrote a few of a couple years ago. I really liked those and forcing oneself to write out of random word choices pretty much demands some creative thought process. But in terms of story-telling, I am thinking to write stories based on emotions (ie: A story about happiness, a story about pity etc.) both fictional and non. After the cut I’ve included a pretty complete list of emotional states for handy reference as well as a link to a random word generator.

This being April 1st, I am going to set a two-week goal. One story or essay per day from either exercise. That takes me up to my union convention and bargaining which will put me out of commission for a couple of weeks – so it seems reasonable to set the bar there. Let’s see how disciplined I can be between now and then.

Random Word Generator

Anger
Fear
Sadness
Happiness
Disgust
Interest
Acceptance
Affection
Aggression
Ambivalence
Annoyance
Apathy
Anxiety
Boredom
Compassion
Confusion
Contempt
Contentment
Curiosity
Depression
Disappointment
Doubt
Ecstasy
Empathy
Envy
Embarrassment
Euphoria
Forgiveness
Frustration
Gratitude
Grief
Guilt
Hatred
Hope
Horror
Hostility
Homesickness
Hunger
Hate
Humility
Hysteria
Jealousy
Loneliness
Love
Paranoia
Pity
Pleasure
Pride
Rage
Regret
Remorse
Revenge
Shame
Suffering
Surprise
Sympathy
Vanity

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