I've decided to do a bit of a fun experiment today. I have decided to give you my freewriting session as-is. I will add links afterwards where I think are relevant, but nothing beyond that.

For I have to confess, sometimes on LinkedIn (please don't ask me why I'm scrolling LinkedIn) there are professionals giving the advice that others should be writing their posts in all-lowercase, or make intentional spelling errors, or completely forgo em dashes. All in the name of ensuring their writing isn't flagged as being written by generative AI.

And I really get a kick out of this. Surely, anybody would be able to recognize that it would take a single prompt to modify a body of text to follow these anti-rules, right?

No. What we need is writers who aren't afraid of writing weird shit. I'm not talking about rhythmic sentence length variation or using unusual mechanics here. I'm talking about storytelling the rainbow you saw shimmering oil-slick prophecy in gasoline puddles. The one-legged magpie hopping across the roof from your bedroom window just above the scent of yesterday's stale coffee congealing on the table. The tangible consumed, experienced and shared. Chewed. Spat out. Swallowed again. What are we focusing on today? And for tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow? Creeps in this petty pace from day to day. Conjure reference to Shakespeare. A séance. Remind the world that Eliot showed us fear in a handful of dust.

The lackadaisical is in the monotony. Do not allow yourself to be imbued within the black tar of mundane FOMO. When we forget we are in the middle of a thousand-year-long dialogue with everyone else who has spoken before. I'll quote an excerpt from my thesis:

In the 4th floor of the university library, there's a climate-controlled room full of medieval artefacts—I think of hands cramping around quills, monks illuminated manuscripts, the slow accretion of human knowledge. Now, in the Tim Horton's line, I watch a student craft a perfectly worded Instagram caption, her thumbs flying over the glass screen with the same intensity those monks must have felt. These are, in fact, parallel acts of literary creation, both deserve serious study and consideration within our discipline.

Ay, that's the rub, I think. To hold the contradiction—cradled as a feral cat—that our present-moment weird shit writing holds the same gravity as the academic museum archives. We are no lesser. Whether our diaries, blogs, and musings will be kept and cherished is not for us to know. (Composted. Found printed on deteriorating server farms.) Does Whitman not remind us that we contain multitudes? That in order the writer sing the song of myself, they must surrender to their self-contraction. Very well then I contradict myself.

It is uncomfortable, yes. There is nothing without tension—bowstring pulled taut before release, kettle screaming before the whistle. But the blooming flowers give us fruits of labour. As I've written before, any block a writer has is self-imposed. Do not pretend you are too-good for whatever is written without hesitation. Do not stick your nose up at the gifts your mind gives you at the instant flash. The first thought is the best thought. You just type whatever the hell is conjured by a mind unrestrained by the editor or critic. You just continue, no backspace, no hemming and hawing.

What image is written? The blue sky bleached old denim. The sound of melting snow running down the eavesdrop, drip-drip-dripping. The pattern of rugged tactile rooftop shingles. The gentle hum of background traffic. The swaying branches of the poplar and paper birch across the street in a wind-drunk dance. The high-pitched whine of brakes This is what is in front of me right now. And now is now is now. Larkin reminds us to ask, where can we live but days?.

Shake the dust. Take stock of what you have and use it instead of asking for more. Take time every single day for this practice and ritual. Yes, as you probably have guessed by now, I am talking about Freewriting. The morning pages from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. I do not think there is any better advice for a writer than to write 750 damn words each day as fast as possible, fingers racing, running from something, just like what I am doing now. How else will the muscle of the writing be trained? How else will we erode the writer's block and calcified buildup of fear and perfectionism? Plaque on a long tooth.

Will the words you end up writing be fit for consumption? No. Oh, but will they be dull and lack colour? Probably not. And most likely, there will be a seed somewhere in the fertilizer (to put it politely) you just produced. And from there something will grow that is uniquely you. Regardless if the seedbed is on the precipice of a cliff or inside a sleepy fenced yard, or strangling in kudzu.