RE: Envy, A FreeWrite
It's a total freewrite. It does capture some difficult feelings I've been having regarding a certain recent post that denigrated freewrites (and was generously rewarded by curators to my utter disgust), but not a bit of what I had been working on prior to reading the prompt, setting the timer, starting to write, and having no idea what I was even going to write about, is in this freewrite - it was 100% unexpected. It's a great example of what I love most about freewriting - truth comes hurtling out, effortlessly. My characters speak in their own voices - that always surprises me the most. The bitch who thinks she can write makes the same errors and pronouncements in her little speech that she makes in her writing. The protagonist is submissive and self-doubting, which was my reaction to to the aforementioned denigrating post. It baffles me how this happens. It's magic.
Magic it is when our subconcsious, aka our Muse, makes sense of the detritus of our daily lives and shoots it out as prose. Good prose, not drivel, I will add. :)
...it was 100% unexpected. It's a great example of what I love most about freewriting - truth comes hurtling out, effortlessly. My characters speak in their own voices - that always surprises me the most.
As for the comment about freewrites being a waste of one reader's time, I felt 99.999% certain I was the target of that remark--that I am the writer who's grown "sloppy"--but even if writers like you are the target, I'm biting my tongue and restraining my sword hand. Not because I don't care to defend others against bullying! I can do that behind the scenes. Bullies are best ignored (a lot of the time). Some act out for the attention. Why feed it? Why give them the drama and conflict they're after? Someone was lurking on my Freewrites and screen-shotting things I wrote in the comment section about a real-life neighbor (as if anyone at #freewritehouse knows or cares who that person is), and it's not rocket science figuring out who would do that, but it's also not worth any drama or confrontation. It's no use fighting opinions of those who denigrate us. This neighbor expends a lot of time and energy on negative attention. So do certain friends and family members that I no longer trust as I once did. So be it. Half a century of asserting myself and explaining and apologizing taught me one thing: the more I try to make amends, the more my efforts at 'damage control' backfire and make things exponentially worse. You can't reason with mental cases and d^ckwads.
So, gray-haired granny that I am, I've been tossing the sword to the side and forging ahead with my own thing, be it freewriting or editing or book reviewing, or (gasp!) polishing and publishing my own novels at last.
I'm not ashamed of my freewrites. I had fun with them. I have a large cast of characters now that never existed before the daily prompt arose.
Having someone dismiss my writing as drivel just doesn't faze me. There's a book titled I Only Have So Many Sh^ts to Give and that's about where I'm at. Oops. Never trust my memory. Here's the book: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
The cover blurb:
Let's send Oprah Winfrey to the curbside and live life as it comes.
And let the true stories out by freewriting.
Yeah!
Even if the Not Giving a F^^k author is a millennial trotting out his own buzz words and F-bombs for shock value. We can only take so much positivity, right? :)
Sometimes the crabby old lady on sitcoms makes us laugh because she has the guts to say what she thinks without fear of consequences. She's in her final years. No time to waste, to suffer fools.
My big mistake was thinking that I could be like that before age 50. Live and Learn, and read Dale Carnegie!