Out of Nowhere

It's funny sometimes how a story starts in your mind. Sometimes random words just come together and start to mean something to you. Today I was eating lunch and a first sentence came to me. Of course, after the first sentence comes there's no way to simply stop there. I wrote the sentence down with a few notes and I'll have to come back to it another time.

A good place to get started when you feel like you have no idea what to write is magneticpoetry.com. You can buy magnetic poetry there, but I prefer to play with it online - and that’s free. It’s listed in my Delicious links.

The other night I went to the website and moved words around for quite a while. I almost had a poem three different times then I'd rest the poetry kit when I decided I didn't like what I was putting together. Finally I wrote a poem about water and, having a very dull moment, I called it ‘Water’ too.

I just use their site to get myself going. I don't like to limit myself to the words in the kit. And I don't want to sit there all day sifting through every single word they offer either. Many times I'd be short a 's' for a plural word or an 'and' or an 'ing' so I play with the words as long as I feel I need to and then I'm off to start writing whatever's formed in my mind.

I open my word processing program and put it all down, the magnetic as well as the non-magnetic portions. I like to split the screen so I can still see the words I put together online while I’m adding whatever I need to finish the poem, or whatever it’s become – but it’s usually a poem.

I use it as a little exercise to get myself moving. When I’m done I'm usually ready to make the transition to whatever project I'm working on. I've really liked some to the stuff I've come up with this way, but once I tried it with some other writers and nobody else liked the idea of having a bunch of word strips to play with until an idea formed. Oh well, not every method's going to be good for everyone.

There are some really great tools available online, but the magnetic poetry's among my favorites. Eventually I'll add some others to my Delicious links.