5 Minute Free Write
In grad school, one of my favorite writing exercises was a five minute free write at the beginning of class. Prof. Jane Anne Staw usually gave us a topic, but where you went from that was only limited by your imagination. Each following week, we would take the paragraph from the class before and select an element of it to “write into.” This meant expanding upon a single idea or sentence until you had exhausted all you had to say about it. After about five or six class sessions, you had a pretty good draft for a flash essay on your hands without a whole lot of effort. The writing, surprisingly, often had a naturally circular movement in terms of where it started and where each paragraph would end.
This being grad school, we were, of course, encouraged to write in a “literary” style. To this day, I’m not sure what that meant. The net result was usually some very florid writing emphasizing a metaphorical detail about some object. Whether this made good reading was entirely up to your own “literary” tastes. We generally also had to write about personal experience and autobiography.
Looking back, I’m a little amazed that I made it all the way through grad school. There were plenty of times I thought about just quitting, that it was too much of a hassle and too expensive. Can’t say that I persevered through sheer determination, though. More like laziness, procrastination, and inertia. It was easier to sluggishly push forward than to stop and change direction. But I think it’s helped me to understand and express myself, and I finally overcame that analytical block that I had felt in my studies as an undergraduate — a feeling that I had hit a dead end in the number of ways that I could analyze a text — so it was not all bad. Although the student loan bills are coming back to haunt me now, and I guess the next few years will be the truest test of whether I felt going back to school for another degree was really worth my while or not.