- Listen to that voice in your head continuously rambling on and on.
- Write down what you're hearing, don't edit, don't stop, just keep the voice active and speaking. Even if it veers off to the left, try to keep in step. If you fall behind, take a giant leap, stop where you were and continue with the voice so that you can keep going.
- Finish the thought, do it quickly because the next one's coming up. When you look up from the page, a new thought arrives and you'll have to deal with that. But after you've done step 1 and 2 for a while, you'll get comfortable finishing things off.
- Be weird and wacky. Horses talk, in horse language. Bees seem to plan their attack and sometimes you'll see the cat sitting in front of the television, watching and taking mental notes.
You're normally imaginative in your head, there's stuff there that's singularly yours. Nobody else's in there and you can entertain yourself for brief moments. Sometimes you need the inspiration of a line, a headline, a story you've just read. This afternoon, I read about a young university student who'd fallen off the barrier at Niagara falls. She was posing for a photograph and when she got up to get off, lost her footing and slipped into the water. There were a ton of people watching. I think she's dead, but don't know since the search was still on. Still, that's a pretty bad fall. Few survive, even the idiots who do it intentionally off a barrel. Who'd think of running a barrel off the Niagara falls? Have you seen those falls? You can just imagine that conversation. A few young guys at home, after a few beers, one of them says, "hey, I can bungee jump with the chord tied to one toe." The other says, "hey, I can bungee jump with a the chord tied to one toe off the propeller of a twin engine plane that's ten thousand feet in the air." The third guy says, "well, I can bungee jump off a barrel over the Niagara falls!" They look at each other as though this guy's crazy. "That isn't even bungee jumping," one of them says. "Well, the thing about one toe, c'mon man, your toe would break off. You'd smash into the ground and flatten out like roadkill." "Yeah?" the guy responds, and soon it turns into a bet. Start small, from a barrel roll off the Niagara. But you have to find a barrel first.
Can you see how easy that is. Why was this woman on the ledge? What kind of stupidity is that? They interviewed someone who said that they've also done it, just to get a picture. One of the parks employees said something about eleven million visitors a year. That number sounds really high, but that's not the point. They should build a higher barrier, but then you wouldn't be able to get a good view of the falls.
Use a huge barrel. A really big barrel and have a state of the art interior where you don't feel a thing when you're inside. Have the NASA people build it. Yes, the supermatic barrel. The park people could use it as an attraction. Barrel rolls, just like they have that boat, the lady of the mist that takes visitors close to the falls.
You could be back in your room, remembering when you were a student, in a roach infested apartment. The super roaches, feared no-one, expected to be treated equally like full tenants. You couldn't kill them. Nothing killed these things, the poison only made them stronger. Your only hope was to shrink yourself to their size and combat them, mano a mano. The war would be bloody, but eventually, you come out victorious, and find that you can't resize yourself back to human size. Someone else moves into the apartment and tries to kill you. Now you see how the roaches feel. You won't get your degree, but that doesn't matter right now. You have to save yourself because the friggin' tenant has gone out to buy bug spray. You organise the bugs, it's a life and death situation.
That pie eating contest that you joined. You have to consume fifteen pork pies in less than fifteen minutes. You used to be champ, but you're in your thirties now. Fifteen beers, no problem, but fifteen pies, this will take a miracle. You pray an god sends an angel to grant you your pie eating wish. You wish for victory and you're told that this would come at a price. Anything, you say. The price is that you will have to continue consuming at that rate for the next fifteen years. After you're champ, you don't think it will be a problem but your hunger is dangerous and soon enough, people start looking good enough to eat. They send you to prison not knowing that this is the worst thing that they could have done.
You can't write any more. Your hands tired. All this writing practice has made your fingers numb. You remember the monks who used to copy sections, or entire, books in the fifteenth century. They didn't have printing presses. The books are due back the next day so you have to work by candlelight to copy everything. Your hand is swollen, it's huge. Fingers all gnarled and they expect you to decorate the letters. You're using a quill and patiently dipping it into sepia ink. The fat librarian is watching from the desk at the front of the room. You don't like his look, he's not writing, just eating cheese and cucumber sandwiches. You loath him, hate his fat look and his clean smug smile. You'd like to poke him in the eye with your quill, use it like a dart. Yes, the distance looks doable... perhaps
You live in a one-room apartment but you've bought this IMAX television. They're going to have to knock out doors to get it in the room and you'll probably have to watch it from the ceiling since it will have to go on the ground. You don't know why you bought it but the move Jaws looks awfully interesting when you're on top of it.
You've seen pictures of angels, why do they have wings on their backs? Who's idea was it to give angels wings, like chickens, or pigeons (since chickens don't officially fly). It seems that a more biologically suited way to fly was to open your mouth real wide, revealing gills that came out from your belly. You'd be able to take in air, at a really fast rate, into your body, propelling you forward. By adjusting your belly gills, you could reduce the pressure below you and hence lift off. Simple physics. Genetics could make your tongue act as a propeller. Oh, this is better, perhaps, by eating special foods you are able to release dense gasses from your posterior. These gasses, being dense, would allow you to use them, much as a fish uses water, to propel yourself forward.
You hate grocery shopping, so you enter the store, stand at one corner and mentally visualise the things you want to buy. They come off the shelves, moving down the aisles and neatly place themselves into the basket. The basket wheels itself over to the cash where a ray passes over them so that the cashier doesn't have to pick them out and scan them one at a time. After the scanning is over, the trolley rolls itself out and takes off into the air. You'll both meet up at home later, you have a game and movie to attend.
Dream, it doesn't have to be real, and the more it detracts from the real, the more fun it is to continue. Starting with the a basic idea, you stretch it and milk it for all its worth. The pen that moves itself over the paper and writes your novel for you while you eat pork rinds, drink Dr. Pepper and watch Die Hard 10.
Sometimes you think this stuff up, it's in your head, you can imagine it that's easy. But for some reason, monkey brain, your ever ready censor is there to tell you to watch out what you write. Hey, monkey brain screams, that doesn't make sense, I mean, c'mon, what an idiot you are. And your job is to ignore the sounds and continue on.
Much like I've done for this segment. Unusual circumstances and exaggeration, all good tools to keep the hand moving. This is natural. This is what happens in your head. This should feel good.
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