Complete Sentences in English

 I will now play the complete sentence game in English. I played it in written form, in Spanish, in the post below, and produced 378 words in fifteen minutes. I suspect that I will be able to write (and type) and bit faster in my native language, since it is also the language in which I write my books and articles. The rules of the game, as you might remember, are straightforward: you speak, write, or think in complete sentences for a given period of time, or indefinitely, as the case might be. The game in itself lacks any overt purpose, except as a remedy for insomnia, but I think it might be used as a kind of practice. We are so used to praising imperfection and wanting to accept our shortcomings. This is generally a positive thing, but I think we often undervalue the importance of doing things well. That is my objection to Anne Lamott's idea of the "shitty first draft." I am aware that my drafts improve as my writing in general improves, as is the case with any skill. There is a kind of mystique around writing: the claim that writing, even at the advanced level, needs to be arduous and angst-filled. But playing the piano, for example, I realize that relaxation is key. While learning a piece might be difficult, the music only sounds good if it sounds easy to produce. Writing that is very labored, by the same token, will sound stiff and not very fluid to the reader. There ought to be a serviceable, fluent prose that anyone can produce with relative ease. In the same way, we should be able to talk fluently in our native language, without stumbling all the time. I'm not saying we shouldn't be tolerant of imperfections, but that we shouldn't close ourselves off from the possibility of this kind of fluency. Essentially, when we are having a conversation, we are improvising, producing new sentences we have never thought of before, in a new context for which we haven't, ever, completely prepared. We can think of the complete sentence game as a kind of improvisation, then. We ought to be capable of improvising, fairly well, both speaking and writing.

I can already tell that my ideas are flowing faster in English than in Spanish. This, then, provides me with useful information about myself as a writer. Thinking of Nikita's post on her writing in Spanish and in English, I conclude that this sort of of self-reflection is of great value. Jen's reflection on "shitty first drafts" in relation to her own writing is equally valuable, by the way, in that it is a serious reflection on her own process which might lead her on to various ways of improving her own writing. I still have almost four minutes left. I think at least one thing this exercise demonstrates is that I can type with some facility as well, without looking at the keyboard at all. Some elements of the writing process, then, will be virtually automatic: we are paying attention to the words and phrases, not to the physical process of pushing down keys on a machine. Now, with two minutes left, I hardly know what to say. I've already made the main points that wanted to express and now am simply trying to add to my total word count. Of course, the process of simply generating sentences, even if vacuous in content, is a worthy aim. What we really strive for, though, is to make writing our friend and not our enemy. Someone who is a good writer will automatically have an advantage over someone who struggles with the process of putting down words on paper.