A writing experiment

Just after publishing my last post, about writing discreetly in a notebook, preferably whilst hiding in a cabin in the woods, I read a snippet in the arts section of my union mag The Journalist about the book Dragon Lords by Silvia Hartmann and her project The Naked Writer. 

Hartmann went in completely the opposite direction and wrote her novel live online using Google Drive so people could see her writing and editing in real time. As she was writing, people were commenting in a separate panel at one side of her screen. Hartmann says on her own website: "I could feel the story reacting to their presence and shifting in response. Very strange and extremely exhausting."

She describes a story-writing process in which you do not plot and plan beforehand, you simply sit down at your keyboard and let the story unfold: "If you so much as think in the direction of the story when you're not in front of a keyboard, it will run and you will have lost the opportunity to document it fresh, and in real time. Then you're writing from memory and it's never the same."

The Journalist reports that between September and November, she wrote 76,000 words at a rate of 16 words per minute and had more than 13,000 readers take part. 

The genre is a bit off topic here - apparently the readers called for more sex but it didn't work for the characters - but I think the process is fascinating. And frightening. 

Hartmann's description of the process goes into much more detail and includes her own take on creativity and the subconscious, which she calls the "energy mind". Read more here.

Ironically, she also describes the day she woke up to a power cut and had to write by hand in a notebook.