Yesterday marked half-a-year of my daily fifty-two project. The on-going goal is to force myself to write a little something every day. The on-going goal is to spend a few minutes, maybe ten or fifteen observing something or thinking about something I’ve observed. Limiting myself to fifty-two words was an arbitrary decision, but is/was intended to force me to contract or expand as necessary. It forces me to think (and rethink) about the words I’m using. While complaining about not “really” writing everyday, by which I usually mean a poem, a friend asked if I didn’t consider the daily fifty-two words to be poems. This was a good reminder that poetry can take many forms. I suppose if I broke them up into lines, quite a few of them would look like poems – really long haiku-like observations. I haven’t tracked the project closely to see if I’ve fallen into any patterns: when I write at night, x happens, or when I write on a weekend, y happens. I have noticed that my observations tend to be limited to visual observations. Occasionally I’ll incorporate sound or smell, seldom touch and almost never taste.
Often, I feel like I need to push myself more on how I use language. I have an average vocabulary which means I know thousands of words, but I’d bet I use only a fraction of them. And they don’t have to be fancy words… I’d like to tap into more regular words that I seldom use. I’m not sure how many times I’ve used the word flashlight, but I don’t think it’s very many. The same is probably true for words like charcoal or encyclopedia or taffy. I’m sure I use the words blue or probably or them quite often, but how many times do I say windmill or serrated? I could probably address these things through the editing process… write something in plain/natural language and then substitute more interesting or unnatural nouns and verbs. I wonder if that type of thinking comes naturally to some people – do they write in abstractions and metaphors? Do they naturally see the sky as a blue bottle tangled in tulle? Or the mind as a Carolina skiff lost in the fog? Can I train my brain to see that way?
I suppose the point here is… I’m pleased that I’ve stuck to the practice of my daily fifty-two, but if I’m being honest with myself, some days, I feel like I’m phoning it in or not stretching far enough – both in my subjects and descriptions. If I remember, I’ll try to work a little harder at it and move beyond completing the task.