Sebuah Inspirasi...

Have you ever had something to write -- perhaps a school report, a
business proposal, or even just a simple letter for those back home?

So you set aside some time, cleared a space at your desk, put on some
"writing music", hunched forward over your pad and wrote ... nothing ...
nil ... naught?

Your brows huddled together, tangled with vacant thought. Your
knuckles, a row of whitening little helmets of surrender, tightened around your
pencil.

Tick, tock, the paper's vacant nonchalance taunted you, dared you to
put something down. But you didn't -- you couldn't. You had nothing to
say: Blankness there and nothing else.

Of course you have experienced this: We all have.

Writing is just about the most frightening of all the language skills.

With the exception of public speaking -- itself a trauma so great that
the majority of us fear it even more than we do the reaper's grim
embrace -- the action of facing a blank pressed sheet of lined pulp armed
with merely a No. 2 is something most try to put off as long as possible.


We either forget or are not aware that this dread of filling the empty
page is something all writers experience -- even the most accomplished.


I once read that James Joyce, perhaps the most celebrated novelist of
the 20th Century, lamented after a friend caught him anguishing at his
writing desk that he had not been able to pen more than seven words that
day.

His friend, attempting to lift the author's spirits said, "Seven? But
... that's good, at least for you!"

"Yes," Joyce replied. "I suppose it is. but I don't know what order
they go in!"

And this from a literary god whose most distinguished work's final
chapter consists of a single sentence that runs on for nearly 50 pages.

When it comes to writing, what chance do us mere mortals stand?

While you may never become the next Joyce, Dr Seuss, or J.K. Rowling,
you can become a strong and effective writer who enjoys the challenge
and thrill of creating something out of nothing.

One of the early keys to this growth is learning the prewriting
techniques.

These techniques generate ideas. The ability to create these first
thoughts is vital since the act of actually getting started is often the
toughest part of writing.

The initial ideas germinated by these techniques will liven your
writing with energy, honesty and creativity.

First thoughts are powerful. Most of our lives are spent in a world
made up of messages that have been prettied-up by our internal censors.

This is why it is so refreshing to meet someone who truly speaks his
mind, a real straight-shooter. The prewriting techniques will teach you
how to capture your thoughts at first spark before they have been
altered.

First thoughts are egoless. Uncensored, they are your most honest (no
matter how nutty that may in fact be), and therefore extremely potent.

An honest voice is the door through which strong writing walks. Writing
that lacks an honest voice is timid and flaccid.

First thoughts breed creativity. The power and honesty created by the
prewriting techniques will give you the freedom to be wrong, to be
creative and to essentially write without fear.

While in this zone pieces seem to write themselves. By learning these
techniques, you too can bathe in writing's autopilot sweet-spot.

Next week you will learn what the prewriting techniques are, and
discover how easy it is to master them and add them to your language-skill
arsenal.

Good writing! Andrew Greene is director of Academic Colleges Group
English Jakarta (ACG). If you have any questions about English language
courses or in-company training you can contact him at
Andy.Greene@acgedu.com or 780-5636. His personal blog can be found at
http://writerinjakarta.blogspot.com.

Mining ideas, or how to write well (part 2)
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Today, as promised in the last OnWords column, we will explore the
whats and hows of various prewriting techniques.

So grab your pencil, a fat pad of empty paper and come along. Soon,
with a little practice, you too will find joy within writing's
difficulties.

The skills you learn today, brainstorming, the journalist approach and
listing, are geared toward academic writing. Next week we will delve
into creative techniques that can help even the most constipated of
nonfiction writers.

That caveat notwithstanding, all prewriting techniques produce ideas
that inject energy, honesty and creativity into any writing.

The key to all of these techniques is that they must be approached
playfully. At this stage in the process mistakes are not mistakes. All is a
seed that may or may not take root.

Every sense, every thought that flashes in your brain needs to find its
way to your paper. Nothing is wrong.

Brainstorming

My favorite academic-prewriting technique is brainstorming. Also called
mind mapping, clustering and all sorts of other things, it is not just
a writing skill. It is a mnemonic that goes two ways by both boosting
output and securing intake.

Brainstorming is effective because it mates the visual aspects of our
beings with the verbal.

Besides its visual efficiency, I dig it since it is so easy to turn
into an outline that is ready-made for writing. Just sprinkle in some
lower-case characters, Roman numerals and there you go, a paper merely
lacking verbs and signal words.

To brainstorm, you start by writing a topic in the dead center of a
blank sheet of paper. Then you draw a circle around that topic. The topic
can be a single word, phrase, picture or symbol -- anything.

Then other words -- associations -- will start popping into your mind.
These you write inside circles that are connected to the centered topic
by lines radiating outward from the topic.

As more words come, you write these down while always drawing lines and
circles showing how everything is strung to one another.

These associations become sub-ideas supporting their own web of ideas.
Within five minutes you should have a fully-inked page regardless of
topic.

Journalists' approach

Journalists are taught to report on the five "w"s (who, what, where,
why and when) and the one "h" (how). This grand idea is suitable for any
writer writing on any topic. By addressing these questions during the
prewriting process you will ensure that you are heavy with ideas once
the writing starts.

A simple method of following the journalists' approach is to do the
same as you did with the brainstorming method.

Start with a topic circled in the middle of a paper. Then have each of
the six outward pointing spokes represent a different "w" or "h".

This is also a very quick and easy technique a person can use when
needing to talk on any topic. My IELTS students have used it to great
effect when it comes to the long turn of their speaking examinations.

Listing

This technique is very similar to brainstorming in that ideas are
written down as they come to you. However, listing is more suitable when you
need to whittle down a topic to a point.

For example, Indonesian cuisine is too broad a subject for the reach of
most single papers. It needs to be narrowed down some. The course of
thought could go like this:

* Indonesian cuisine

* available everywhere

* available at all hours

* eat at home

* kaki lima hawkers

* often spicy

By following this natural stream of thought you, the writer, would be
left with the specific nugget of writing about the spicy food sold by
the walking peddlers you eat at home.

This very well could be an interesting read.

Next week we shall, as mentioned above, get into techniques that are
more creative and, in my opinion, more fun.

Until then, Happy Writing!

Andrew Greene is director of Academic Colleges Group English Jakarta
(ACG). If you have any questions about English language courses or
in-company training you can contact him at Andy.Greene@acgedu.com or
780-5636. His personal blog can be found at
http://writerinjakarta.blogspot.com.

Mining ideas, or how to write well (part 3)
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Now that we have all had a week to play around with the more staid
prewriting techniques of brainstorming, the journalistic approach and
listing, it is time for us to step out of academic writing's confining
safety and drop into creativity.

Just as last week's skills, these idea-generating techniques give
writing energy, honesty and originality. And, once again, these activities
are meant to be fun, so come along and get happily messy.

Freewriting

The timed exercise is a staple of writing practice. The key to it is to
write continuously for a pre-set amount of time, refusing to pause for
any reason whatsoever.

Freewriting silences your inner-critic and gives you the freedom to get
down those fresh-flashing thoughts hot as they appear.

The rules to freewriting are all about not having any rules: 1. Start
with a topic at the top of the page. It does not matter what that topic
may be. It can even be, "I've got nothing to write about." 2. Let your
hand go, keep it moving. Do not even lift it from the paper. Stalling
is your critic attempting to gain control. 3. Do not edit. Do not reread
what you have just written and do not cross out anything (The time for
that is later in the writing process). 4. Have no worries. Grammar,
punctuation, spelling, neatness do not exist in freewriting. 5. Be
illogical. In freewriting, one plus one does not necessarily equal two. It
may equal 23. Or a pair of fuzzy purple socks. (Who knows, it may even
equal two.) 6. Write with courage. Frightening, naked thoughts are often
the most energized.

Before your writing muscles strengthen, you may want to start
freewriting with short limits such as five, seven or 10 minutes. There is no
magic number. The power lies in your commitment to writing nonstop for
that entire period.

Random book prompts

Bibliomancy is the practice of seeking spiritual insight by randomly
selecting a passage from a holy book.

The art dates back at least 3,000 years from when folks peered into the
I Ching for guidance. Since then, adherents of all the major religions
have done the same with their own particular holy books.

And now you have the power to bring this deliciously groovy technique
into the here-and-now by using it to mine your own writing ideas.

The steps are simple. Set a book -- any tome at all -- on its spine and
let it fall open. Then, with your eyes closed, point to a place on the
open page before opening your eyes and writing down whatever sentence,
phrase or passage your finger has divinely chosen.

That is your writing prompt. You coddle it. You nurture it as you see
fit. A timed freewriting perhaps would suit the prompt or a
brainstorming or even a methodical listing. The options are limited only by your
vision and your courage. What is guaranteed is that through bibliomancy,
you will wander down paths of creation you would have never otherwise
even known existed.

Jump into the unordinary

Daily lives can be boring and be even more boring to write about.
Sometimes it is necessary to try a new angle when it comes to writing. Mix
it up. If you normally write with Leonard Cohen in the background, put
that old Canadian man to bed and give your daughter's Pussycat Dolls a
ride.

Use props, costumes, become someone new. Wear your maid's housedress or
your driver's flip-flops. Buy a monocle, a cigarette holder, a feather
boa. You could change your materials and try generating ideas with the
precision of a jeweler on a series of Post-it notes or you could go in
the other direction, becoming a kid who writes with a fisted-crayon on
a large pad of drawing paper.

The point here is to find a new state of mind in which to write.

Pay attention to the ordinary

Writers keep track of the ingredients that make up life. They write
about the tilt of grins, the roar of bajaj, the way shadows fall across
sidewalks.

Take the above-detailed freewriting technique and use it to explore the
ordinary. Select for your topic something so humdrum you never give it
a second thought and freewrite about it. Your elbow, white rice, your
husband's eyebrows are all ripe, commonplace sources of ideas. Our task
as writers is to find what's special in the everyday.

Final thoughts

As we finish this three-part Mining Ideas series, we need to remember
that practice is as practice does: It is the doing that cranks the taps.


Promise the time to yourself; schedule yourself a mere corner out of
your daily schedule and soon you will be watching the ideas flow.

Andrew Greene is director of Academic Colleges Group English Jakarta
(ACG). If you have any questions about English language courses or
in-company training you can contact him at Andy.Greene@acgedu.com or tel.
7805636. His personal blog can be found at
http://writerinjakarta.blogspot.com.