What is Writing?

 What is Writing?

I attended the Skype session this week on learning how to write. There was a guest speaker, Peter Thomas who spoke about how to write academically and shared his knowledge on planning and organising your writing etc. 

At the beginning of the session we all joined in an activity that was planned by Peter. The activity was free writing, the rules were: 

1. Do not stop writing.

2. If you cannot think of anything to write, write down: 'I cannot think of anything to write' on the paper.

3. Do not worry about spelling or grammar.

4. Just KEEP writing . For 5 minutes.

The topic was 'What is Writing?' I started to write about what I thought writing is and managed to keep writing for the whole 5 minutes which resulted in 2 pages of scribbles and an achy arm!

We then read back our notes and it was so interesting as it was almost like I didn't actually remember writing some of the words down! It came straight out of my brain on to paper with no filter and honestly some of it didn't even make sense! However I found this activity really interesting because you don't have a filter you can almost write freely and something amazing might come out of it that you wouldn't have written if you were planning it! 

We then all fed back our key words that came up in our free writing and there were some really inspiring things.  

1. Communication

2. Patterns on a page

3. Form of art.

4. It is a practice or a 'thing' 

So it is something that you can do OR it is an object (brains ticking)

We looked at some interesting quotes from famous writers about what is writing and there were some engaging views. 

"writing is like prostitution, first you do it for love, then you do it for a few close friends, then you do it for money"  - Molière

"Writing is re-writing" - Ernest Hemingway

Overall the workshop was more than helpful and inspiring. We looked at different way to plan and organise such as mind maps, lists and free writing.

We also asked the questions, what is the purpose of the text? why is it here? and who is the reader?

Something to work towards when writing.... I hope that anyone who missed this amazing session will find help from my blog...