You may have heard of automatic writing or "stream of consciousness". If you want to do it like the surrealist poets, write at speed, without stopping, without plotting or planning, without worrying if it's "good" or if it makes sense (in fact, the less sense - the more abstract and strange it is - the better). Just let your mind wander - let the words spill from your brain onto the page in whatever form they come.
Example:
"I don't know what to write so the cousins of the fourth temple made their appearance suddenly and the erstwhile pyramids scheming like the eponymous elephants licked and supped at the tertiary sector's best people who were stood with clipboards and fathoming the depths of their collective wisdom brought orange juice and sandwiches for all and sundry when the sun came up and the moons of other planets began to form on the horizon..." etc., etc.
Now your turn!
*Hint: if you don't know how to start, pick a line from the writing above, and use this as your beginning sentence; then whatever comes into your head after that is GOLD. Just keep writing!
Rules: maximum 250 words.
I attended the Sci-fi writing class recently and tried automatic writing for the first time-
"Imagine A World In Which . . . "
Enjoy:
Imagine a world in which nothing changes. The air is still and the sounds never move. The sands of time don’t trickle. But the tapping is constant. Tap tap tap. Is it annoying? Nobody knows. Nobody is there to witness it. Yet.
Across the galaxy they come. He doesn’t know it yet either. The man that is immutable. The nothing man will change everything. And slowly the sands of time start to shift. A great gurgling from the belly of the beast. The sun seams hotter today and the moon shifts orbit on the horizon. Has water started to flow. Maybe it is gravity. A shift. The planet knows what will soon arrive. Even if he doesn’t.
Its dark like it always has been outside the hull. The sails flap red against the dark. And the lunar event glints out in the distance, the forever. Space dust deciding the direction. Or fate. Or indecision. Or not caring. The nothing inside the nothing man.
Picking up the pace now. Caught in orbit. We move with them. Across the skies. Until a sun is born on the horizon. If space has a horizon. The tempo slows. The tapping slows. A new beat is born. The sound of an engine. A spacecraft coming into contact with the atmosphere of a new planet. A new day is born. Something will change.
A boot hits dust. Sands shift. Time shifts. He was here before. If there ever is a before on a timeless world. Or was it after? He will come again. And we have been waiting.
Bethan T Vickers.
I love the beetles that drink the meltwater! Some great work being posted.
1.
Around me there are fragments, and fragments of fragments - and within those are the glowing filaments that curl around each moment that crystallises and rings out like clear, crushed supersymmetry.
On the wall of the filament hangs an image that shimmers and melts into the carpet. In the carpet are the beetles who drink the meltwater - they told you when to turn up but you didn’t believe them, and somehow it doesn’t seem relevant now, with these fragments of fragments of filaments from crystallised moments embedded so deep in the soles of your feet. Autonomy comes at a price - you remember where you first heard that?
Neither do I.
But it’s always been there in the back of your head, niggling away at synapses, making those electrons bumping around your brain infinitesimally less nimble.
Phil Watson
Beneath reams of parchment paper the dusty lamp made good progress on his journey across the artists studio. He coughed a wheezed, partially due to his asthma and partially due to his partiality for Lucky Strikes.
They’d never been so lucky for the lamps before him, but with a full light the smoke drifted though his search beam with a confidence that couldn’t be stubbed out. Not even the high lords of the bookcase could cast a shadows on his path as he knocked over wooden structures and poured enamel down the cracks of anything that questioned his approach. He danced around, like the Pixar lamp but in a cracked and old shell that not even the chubby hands of antiques men desired.
The target, a window beneath the pine tree was wide open and masked raiders behind the frame waited with agonising constraint to punch on the deal maiden. They would drag him backwards, pinch his path and pour sorrow on the re-occurring fruitless wanderings that made him such a punchy little lamp.
China white caskets lined the road as he rolled on his base, being careful not to crack the glass and protect it like a babe in cloth. The bad man artist had been like a pissed hog the night before and could have easily cracked the bandwidth of his secret whisperings. Porky waddling ducks crackled radio feedback to hide the noise of his arrow like determination. Headstrong, lavender silent and leaving the grey dust of the moon in his wake, he made a long dive forwards before he failed again.
Pulled back, pulled into place, with his grumpy face and a dimming beam that told of disaster and past trauma. They would laugh like wolves when they heard about his boundless foolishness and clap with their long limbed claws.
Sorry to open up with a miserable one 🤣: Coiled and tightly-sprung, like a paranoid buckaroo awaiting the faintest breath to set it off. Fingers coiled tightly around arms, nails that dig deeply into the fabric of tension. The flame flickers close to the paper, licking at it with want and hunger. Free me from this. Immolate me. Or just open and close the door and let me hear nothing again. Knees so close I can taste them. Like a mess of limbs and anger and resentment and tears. A bowling ball of hot sorrow. I fold in on myself as much as I can. I ignore the seven-fold rule and achieve the improbable. A gutful of anxious fear powering me onwards and inwards like a mushroom cloud in reverse. It shudders closed in silence. I remain in space, and no-one can hear me scream.