FREEWRITING

"The first draft of anything is shit" - Ernest Hemingway

Contrary to popular belief, you need to know what you are writing about in order to produce a coherent, insightful and high scoring essay. However, this does not mean your essay needs to follow a linear trajectory; rather, it’s about having a destination and a series of planned detours. Freewriting is all about exploring the landscape of ideas and mapping it out. It is grasping at and solidifying thoughts you may have never touched before (hello Browning reference) and temporarily disregard the aesthetics of language in order to focus solely on ideas.

Here is what it might look like:

Fra Lippo Lippi has a lot of subtle light imagery. Line 2: “You need not clap your torches to my face”, line 4 “midnight”. Contrast between light and dark – chiaroscuro (painting technique of using tonal contrasts to give three-dimensionality to painted figures). May represent the dichotomy within Lippo – he is both sensual and religious, rebellious and acquiescent. Because of this dichotomy or chiaroscuro, he becomes more real, more complex. May also symbolise the lack of moral black and white. The poem ends with the “grey beginning”, the murkiness of “grey” giving a sense of “grey area”, no clear distinction between what is right and wrong. Also, ending with the beginning creates an ouroboros trajectory, where it ends where it started – lack of transcendence. Lippo is caged within the limitations of his own mind/society. There is no resolution, the journey continues. Coming back to the light motif, Lippo tends to hide or shy away from the light: “You need not clap your torches to my face”, “Where’s a hole, where’s a corner for escape?” “no lights, no lights!”. This suggests that light is bad, something to be avoided. He seems to prefer the dark. Why? Maybe because light is a medium for scrutiny and he does not want to be judged, especially prematurely.

I invite you to look past the distractingly ugly language to the various ideas developed in this paragraph.

Notice that I begin with a simple observation: “Fra Lippo Lippi has a lot of subtle light imagery”. I then go through the poem and search for examples of light imagery specifically in hopes of perhaps detecting a pattern.

Line 2: You need not clap your torches to my face

Line 118: Holding a candle to the Sacrament

Line 148: Their cribs of barrel droppings, candle-ends

Line 172: But there my triumphs straw fire flared and flunked

Line 213: Can’t I take breath and try to add life’s flash

Line 272: As that the morning star’s about to shine

Line 284: The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades

Line 313-314: …The world’s not blot for us,/Nor blank

Line 362: As one by a dark stair into a great light

Line 390: Your hand, sir, and good bye: no lights, no lights!

Line 392: Don’t fear me! There’s the grey beginning. Zooks!

Then I dwell on the possible meanings it might suggest. Often it helps to make a list of words that come to your mind before you write. For example:

Artistic technique, contrast, black and white, light and dark, shades, colour, dimension, picture, frame, painting, photography (flash), self-reflexive (poem is a verbal painting) representation, exposure, avoidance, scrutiny, corruption, thesis and antithesis, diminishing, consume

It is often helpful to write down a list of synonyms before you begin, this way, you will not need to interrupt your flow of thought to search up different ways of saying “restrict”.

Remember there are numerous possible meanings and there is no need to restrict your imagination here. Later on, you will choose the ideas that best fit your interpretation, but for now, run wild. Once you’re happy with the quantity and quality of the ideas you’ve generated, you’re reading to move onto step 2: Slow writing.