There's an excercise called free writing where you write anything and everything you think as rapidly as you can regardless of how stupid it sounds, or looks, or whatever. It's suppose to allow you to move into your left brain, which is the creative one, and work from there rather than the right brain, which is the bossy bitchy one. A lot of the stuff that you write in the first ones is totally stupid and weird cause it's harder to reach the left brain. But after a while it really helps you with creative writing (metaphors, description, etc.), and it's the kind of thing you can do basically anywhere in any free seconds that you have.

Maybe we should have some kind of meeting where people bring in writing they've done before and show it off or where people do excercises like the free write and share them and use them as tools in writing. I mean writing is a fairly lucid and flexible topic. Getting a writing circle in motion would be fairly simple. All we need is a time/date/place; People could bring they're own writing and ideas and whatever else they want to bring, and meetings wouldn't really have to involve that much planning or agenda. Even if we put together a zine or something of that nature, the only thing we'd really need was email and other forms of communication (i.e. this site).

I think that a writing circle is probably even more possible than our already very possible mobile art squad.

i wrote this in like 2003, it all came to me at once and was real inspiring. then i performed it a whole buncha times and got sick of it, but anway, here it is

STORIES

While waiting for the train at Union Square one night
It suddenly dawned on me
EVERYONE IS A STORYTELLER
The revelation came rushing towards me like an express train
driven by a conductor on a Friday night joyride,
screeching to a halt just seconds before crushing me with its enormous implications
EVERYONE IS A STORYTELLER
EVERYTHING IS A STORY
every crack in the wall, every stain on the floor
every mournful note conceived in the musician’s heart
and pushed through the saxophone as though that golden tube was a birth canal
and the song, a child

The quick click-clack, click-clack of a woman in a suit walking is a story
The click-clack of her heels striking the same place at the same time every day
is the rhythm of her routine
But listen – she’s humming to herself, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow…”

HOLY SHIT! The notion of the status of every single atom as storyteller,
every single molecule as prophet, was causing me to lose my sense of balance
I gripped onto the wooden bench, my mind reeling,
spinning as though it were a wheel driven by a continuous flow of thoughts

An elderly man waited at the edge of the platform
I began to study the wrinkles on his face, the topography of his life,
mapping out not only space but time
His wrinkles told of hard work and hearty laughter
illustrating every year like rings on a tree stump
And that was only the first chapter of his story – don’t even get me started on his shoes…

Four soldiers stand stoically by the entrance to the station,
too young to buy liquor but old enough to kill
the blinked-back tears in one of the boy’s eyes
speak volumes about homesickness and lost youth
Their knuckles are white grasping guns that weigh five times as much as the Iraqi baby who was born on the other side of the world just as my train arrived

The gray-haired man with wild eyes and a wheezing accordion
picks his way through the crowded N train with a tap-tap-tap of his cane
He may be blind but he can read you like a book,
read your callused fingertips like Braille as you hand him a quarter
The tunes he coaxes out of his well-worn instrument
will tell you stories and secret methods for seeing without eyesight, if you only listen

My fascination with the infinite number of stories
seeping through every crevice in existence would not allow me to sit still any longer
I got up and started to pace the length of the platform,
Every hair on my body standing on end like story antennae
“If these walls could talk…” What do you mean IF?
Not only do they talk, but they SING!
And so do the trees and concrete and cockroaches

The poet is a Story Archeologist,
excavating fossilized dreams from metamorphic chunks of compressed metaphors,
meticulously extracting fragments of experiences and skeletons of memories
from sedimentary layers of time,
frantically scrawling notes in ink the color of liquid bruises,
in hopes of documenting every idea and emotion that has ever existed

So you better grab your pen and get digging -- we’ve got a lot of work to do

it's great to see people taking an interest in this colab. I thought i would wait until i was back in a couple weeks, but this stuff is really taking off. everyone's ideas are really great. I'm interested in all types of writing from journalism to novels and can speak intelligently on all these forms. t.v scripts vs. screen scripts, short story vs. the novel, etc, etc...

writing circles are indeed a good thing and all the ideas that are coming out of this thread are a good example of why. my thoughts are kinda scattered at the moment, so i'll refrain from trying to wax intellectual on theory, form, or my own suggestions for learning to write well and have fun doin it but i will leave you with one poem i wrote a while back that is the kind of free flow and one that was thought about more to see the differences. i won't suggest what you should notice. maybe we can discuss it further through this thread. which makes me realize this is one thing we could also do. present our work and open it up for discussions on issues surrounding said work. anyway here they are:

"Images"

Whiskey women and trail blazing adventure sparks the oil that lights the flame. Time tempted to spill over into unwanted machinations, the gears slicked and cranked at the ready to follow an ever winding road to oblivion. I sat up drinking thinking up this imaginary machine that turns gears into dreams. The lights of the eyes burn the hardwood floors of many moons and walked over the blue ones, yes much time has passed since I last left you hanging out the window to dry your tears, but before I could realize your raving algorithms, I thought I’d follow the sun and with angels in the outlets, I am electric. All charged like that wire you sold me while trying to stay alive. You snapped like a vine twisting in night’s wine. This is the vino that we drink. This is the uproar that causes panic to be dismantled…and we wait for the breakdown. The tenement windows lit up like fireflies and I’m still dreaming of a charged atom that has no force over the gears that have slipped past your eternity as the smoke of the engine hits your lips. I was wrestling with freedom, while you were wrestling with hopeless abandonment and trying to follow Rimbaud but got lost in the migrations of your own mind as you watch the moss grow old and grapes go sour. The green leaves shine in neon midnight and they are dying with you. I’m tired now that I’ve seen the steely gates of your laughter rising out of the sewer. A million pieces of me left on the ledge while you waited for the moon to jump. I shot arrows into diamond dirt and the asphalt you left behind. Ground in rushing to a reflection, a mirrored gaze cast in shadow with the heat of that engine and those gears. The smoke hit your lips and the dance begins again. The dance of a thousand nothings rolled into one because movement needs motive so the galaxies collide bursting forth with illumination of mind and mine was lost forever. So empty the pool that surrounds your deafening existence. Rise up from the last rays of an ever dying sOn. You know that your mood is that of hellish fire spread over hot concrete. And I am flying against the river of your discontent. I’m just feeling my way through the cracked metal, the shards of glass. I bleed over into moonshine and lick the amber from my wounds, while you ponder whiskey women, gears, atoms and the blue moon. You follow a winding road through electric angels, panic, and eternity. You twist in the neon midnight with a glass of vino in your hand, you are lucid as the smoke of that machine hits your lips, the dance begins again.

"Circles"

these guys i knew dusted off the dirt, and they fight like every night behind a bar.

and they fight for a crack whore who loves them for the cravings they will quench at 4am in a shooter, like no one ever got shot from a shooter, and they stay safe from the night's howls.

Or are they the howl, or, are they in the howl? as one draws first blood they like the gladiator spirit, and this is the only thing that moves them as the crack makes their minds still, and they need that like they need to draw blood from all manner of life.

and they fantasize about being alive when they sit on slow motion, a hand crooked like a monkey paw looking out windows every five seconds waiting for the third.

a Monkeyshine they call him, as he moves in the same circle in the same bar on the same night and steals for spite...to spite the men that left him bleeding, and now for him there's none left...only alley, and pipe, and whore, and two guys waiting to draw blood.

but they drink anyway to starve the pain, it comes through in a shooter, like no one ever got shot from a shooter...and they move in this circle