Yeah, I must confess, I'm not really thinking very hard today. This is going to be a freewrite.
When I was in High School, I took creative writing from James Mitsui. During the time I took creative writing from him, he strictly forbade us to look at his own poetry, lest we take hints from it on how to write to appeal to him. In any case, he taught creative writing the way that any good teacher would teach it. He gave us two or three writing assignments a week, which we didn't have to do if we didn't want to. The only requirement was that every Friday we turn in a PFF, a Paper For Friday, that would be the graded work for that week. We were encouraged to turn in a LOT more work, which he would critique and give back, but we weren't graded on. If he liked it, he might put the work on a handout for the class, and we would have discussions of the works on the handouts. While it was an honor to have one of your poems on the handout, it was absolutely brutal if the class chose to discuss your poem. Nobody held back: we learned from Mitsui how to critique seriously.
I spent a lot of time writing bad poetry and learning how to write better poetry. While I don't think I'm a particularly good poet, I think I at least understand how to write a poem. That's why my poetry is freely available on my website. I don't particularly care who quotes it, as long as I get credit, and I never expect to earn anything from any of my poems. If you somehow manage to read through the lot, I can only say I salute you.
In any case, I never intended to be a poet when I entered High School. Until I got into Mitsui's class I had been writing prose short stories, some of them truly awful. But, being a poet, Mitsui emphasized poetic writing, although he didn't have a problem with us students turning in prose. So my endeavors turned to poetry. But I still liked prose, and every once in a while Mitsui would suggest a freewrite and I would love every minute of it.
Basically, Mitsui would say, "Today we will have a ten minute freewrite. When I say 'go' you will start writing about any subject you want to. At the end of ten minutes, I'll say 'time is up' and you'll all put your pencils down." Sometimes he would ask us to read from them. Sometimes he'd ask us to turn them in. Because of the time limit, they were always prose. To Mitsui, they were a gateway into the creative reaches of the mind. When you are simply writing whatever you think, limited only by the speed of your hand, with no self-editing, no arranging, no organization... you are getting as close as you can possibly get to pure thought on paper. While most of the students would then work on the ideas on paper to turn them into poems, I sometimes re-worked a freewrite into a short prose piece.
In any case, a freewrite is a geniune piece of creative writing, unfinished but pure. And that's all you are getting today for a blog. Sorry.
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