Getting into the habit of writing

Wow! It feels so good to write again. So what prompted me this time? Well, I attended a half-day training at the Nottingham University Graduate School yesterday titled "Getting into the habit of writing". I'm sorry, I've neglected to mention on this blog that I have since relocated from Nigeria to England, to pursue yet another degree :). Ever since I got here in September, I've been passively looking for something exciting to write about, something worthy of record. But like I said to my sweetheart, life here tends to be uninteresting and drab, compared to life in a place like Nigeria. Too much predictability eventually makes a thing boring, and that is what I think has happened with this society. A lady missionary to Tanzania in my church cell group was asked what she's had the most trouble re-adjusting to, now that she's back in the UK. She said she missed the excitement that comes with working in Africa: having to fix a fault in her sturdy Land Rover when stranded on a lonely pot-holed road between villages because there's no AA team to come to the rescue; praying every time she embarked on a journey with her team because, given the road conditions, there was no guarantee they would arrive, etc. I see her point.

Well, to my own point. "Getting into the habit of writing" was organised to instruct postgraduate research students in writing tips and techniques that will ultimately assist them in churning out top-notch PhD theses. One of such tips is the concept of 'freewriting'. Tested and proven by several literary experts, freewriting is a tool that has been recommended for anyone writing anything. This means that the technique is not limited to academic writing. Freewriting, as the term suggests, simply means writing freely. It means that whether or not you think you have something to write, go ahead and write. Just write; start by writing anything off the top of your head. What you write initially may not even have anything to do with what you really want to write about, but at least it gets you writing. Freewriting really is writing without thinking. If you've ever written anything you'll agree with me that thinking is a very important part of writing. In fact, thinking is the first step to writing. But if you can't think anything, how can you write anything? How do you transfer a blank mind to paper? I believe this is what is popularly referred to as 'writer's block', and it is indeed the greatest stumbling block to writing.

Freewriting advocates that you write when you know you should be writing, even when you don't think you have anything to write. Whatever writing project you may be faced with, be it an office report, a school essay or a blog post, you can get started by freewriting. It's much like splashing cold water on someone's face to get them out of the grogginess of sleep: freewriting jolts your brain out of the lethargic state it might be in, slowly at first, and then with increasing pace until your mind finally catches up with your pen (or your fingers, as the case may be).

Right there in the training session, I decided to put this theory to the test. Admittedly, I haven't yet tried it with my lab reports (I'll start with those on Monday), but I figured I might make a start with my critically neglected blog. I realise now that though life is pretty much monotonous here, the problem may be as much mine as it is the system's. Perhaps if I took time to observe events more closely amidst the daily, seemingly repetitive grind of life, perhaps I'd be able to spot a thing or two that might be of interest. Even on a seemingly regular day, perhaps if I took to my computer and just punched out the details of the talkative old lady that sat beside me on the bus to school, or of how I struggled to change a light bulb today for the first time in my life because there's no one here to do it for me, perhaps a story could emerge somewhere in between the lines. Perhaps.