I just had THE most liberating experience

[gaeln9796]

WHAT
I've started reading Ursula K. Le Guin's book on writing, Steering The Craft. Having just completed Chapter Two, (Punctuation: which sagely advises reading Strunk & White's Elements of Style) I decided to do its exercise, which was simply to write 350 words of narrative without any punctuation, no commas, no periods, no apostrophes, and no paragraph breaks.
WHY
Why this was so liberating is because I'm kind of a persnickety writer, too fussy with every word in each sentence even while in first-draft mode. It takes me forever to write anything. Using this exercise as my guide, just getting out words all thrown down in a bunch, I wrote 335 words in 15 minutes. Three hundred and thirty-five words in 15 minutes!! And they're good words, which actually does matter. For me, that's like lightening speed.
OUTCOME
I'm going to use this method in the future because however long it will take me to clean up those 335, I will still end up with better writing done more quickly. I can't wait for Chapter Three.

Title of Chapter Two::damn the semicolons cried the captain full speed ahead :)

To put this into perspective, it took me nearly an hour to write the above, barely 200 words. Seriously.

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Comments

[sydneyalexis.livejournal.com]

Never heard of this book. Might have to give it a read.

Have to say that writing w/o punctuation would drive me mental.

[gaeln.livejournal.com]

I thought writing without punctuation would drive me mental too, but instead, I just let the words flow, stream-of-conscious, and it was wonderful. It will take some time adding punctuation in but, for me anyway, it will be worth it.

If you do read le Guin's book, let me know what you think.