Free Writing Ideas

Write about five different things, one for each sense - sight, sound, touch, taste and smell - that you have experienced in the previous 24 hours.

We don’t have to search far for material to write about – it’s constantly around us, we just have to notice it, and remember to make a record of it.

Paint the picture/moment/event in words - really see (re-experience) all the details.

Give yourself 10 to 20 mins for each one. Start writing and make yourself continue until your chosen time is up.

You could do one a day for the next five days. Don't worry about reading back over them. Let them sit in your notebook for a while.

And for a little inspiration, here are some delicious excerpts from Charles Simic's notebook:

Seeing is determined not by the eye but by the clarity of my consciousness. Most of the time the eyes see nothing.

My soul is constituted of thousands of images I cannot erase. Everything I remember vividly from a fly on a wall in Belgrade to some street in San Francisco early one morning. I'm a grainy old, often silent, often flickering film.

Two young birch trees wrestling in the wind. The crow in the snow refereeing.

The day I went to make funeral arrangements for my father-in-law, I caught a glimpse of the mortician's wife nursing the mortician's new daughter. Her breasts were swollen huge with milk.

The restaurant is Greek. The waiter's name is Socrates, so Plato must be in the kitchen, and Aristotle is the fellow studying a racing form at the cash register. Today's special, grilled calamari with fresh parsley, garlic, and olive oil.

From The Poet's Notebook, Excerpts From The Notebooks Of 26 American Poets, WW Norton New York 1995.

Write well.