Free writing – imaginatively with words jamen

Vincent van Gogh’s pictures probably occur in every school lesson – as a detached image descriptions in German. A long or sixth grade in the Waldbröl high school caught me in the fifth or sixth grade. There was homework to describe the picture “Caféterrasse in the evening”, which van Gogh painted in 1888. I didn’t feel like it and couldn’t have guessed that the next morning I would be the first to present my image description of the class. In front of me was the empty booklet, panic in me, so I decided in a flash: “I improvised!”

I got up, looked at the open reading book with the van Gogh picture and got rid of the clip-up, about this: »You can see a alley in a city on a summer evening. The foreground determines a brightly lit café, while the background of a wonderfully blue-gold starry sky over high black houses on the street that is pulled far backwards … “Here the teacher interrupted me:” Please read the last sentence again! “I:” Why? “I would like to know where you put the comma.”

The literal repetition of the box set had to fail. The teacher could be given my schoolbook, saw that nothing stood in it and wrote the grade “6” because of “fraudulent deception”, which was also noted in the class book. My mother had to come to the parents’ consultation. There she learned that her son was an “uncomfortably sneaky guy”.

Write down what your heart desires

Many decades later, in October 2007, I published a newspaper advertisement in which I invited to test improvised writing in a group; to write down “what your heart desires”. The people who want this deliberately want to work themselves creatively and-as in the usual literature circles-only read foreign literature that have written, read, read and discuss them. And so we still write stories for children and adults in a playful way in the »writing workshop«, poems with and without rhyme, fairy tales and autobiographical, about nature and about the city. It is also about life philosophical questions, but above all anarchically fantasized and absurd stories, often stimulated by pieces of music, photos, cartoons and pictures. The central concept of our work is “improvisation”: not as an emergency or laying solution, as you are used to in everyday life, but as an artistic practice. We try to write creatively out of that moment.

The writing sessions have been taking place in the cooler season since 2007, 14 days on Saturday afternoon from 2:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., interrupted by a coffee and cake break. At the beginning, I do thematic writing suggestions, for which around ten adults-including myself-come up with something. That will be written down in half an hour. Everyone works for themselves and at the end it is read aloud. We are always excited to see what comes out of such an afternoon.

The model of these writing sessions is the jam session in jazz: when musicians meet outside of their own concerts to play together. Then take a melody from the music tradition, so -called standards and agree on harmonies that match. This is how a “spontaneous and purpose -free, ie of commercial interests unencumbered together”, as the musicologist Ekkehard Jost writes. Solo or collective improvisations are possible, but all musicians have to stay in the agreed harmonious trend and hold the clock scheme. The more is discussed beforehand, the less can be improvised freely. That is why you can usually only listen to arranged improvisations at concerts and on record shots.

But improvisation in jaming also requires preparation, it has to be learned. History of jazz, this learning was essentially autodidactic until the 1970s: about listening and re -playing, trying and error. By moving into jazz pedagogy into the (music) universities since the mid-1970s, improvisation could then be trimmed on the basis of written control systems. Since then, musicians have learned the same improvisation patterns, free forms of play have been the exception.

Improving with words is not so restricted: when jaming with words, the agreed topic replaces the basic melody of the jazz session. A literary form (a story, a poem) takes the place of the harmonies, especially the individual work of the participants does not have to come together for a group sound. Every writer approaches the task with very different personal requirements and in different ways. Learning the improvisation is done here in the jazz in a self -taught manner. You hear the scribes of others and are often stimulated to further develop your own writing: “I could try it that way …”

Ten different forms of intelligence

Writing incentives can be completely different topics: “Found a book author with a book title plus blurb and review”, “describes ten different forms of intelligence” or “continues first sentences from novels”. You can also consist of the combination of random words, such as “the pizza baker and the fan of heating”, or you can invent a story “in which food appears as people”. If the task is too detailed, the improvisation options are neglected.

Similar to the jazz of the band leader, the ladder in the writing workshop pays attention to a certain range – between the improvisation, which is to be made possible and the arrangement that regulates. The head organizes the writing facilities; The occasion that stimulates writing: this can be bizarre reports in newspapers or memorable situations in novels or original everyday experiences. At the meetings he does not play the censor or judge, because there are no comments like “You do it right” or “You do it wrong”. This is the crucial difference to the writing workshops that are practiced like writing schools, which are often guided by writers who implicitly demand that it is best to write as they do.

In our writing workshop, the ladder does not urge itself as a critical interpreter between the readers and their listeners. He consciously guarded the educational giant trap of the know -it -all. The literary ethics, which he feels committed, means: promoting the feeling of being subject – through improvisational self -determination. Self -responsibility is made possible by freedom fantasy.

The joint letter does not require literary criticism, especially without the usual, often enough, but discriminatory, there is to weaken. The consistent description of the letter enables spontaneous openness to the content, the results of which the writers are always amazed. It was never thought of publishing a book with the writing results as a group, and the texts created here are not scientifically evaluated. Everyone takes their own text home.

Line as an accompaniment includes to contribute manual instructions on literary forms and techniques (e.g. the structure of short stories or poems with and without an end rhyme): no game without rules. But also no rule without deliberate individual deviations. Since undermouting is mostly experienced as boredom, it is always important to formulate unexpected things as a challenge. If the ladder experiences that the writing ideas he suggests does not develop, he can draw design conclusions for a new test.

Own experience as a treasury

Your own living environment is the treasury of writing ideas. In autobiographical writing you can gain access to all the funny, sad and angry stories in your own life that are just waiting to be written down. The literary appropriation of one’s own childhood in autobiographical writing is always different at the time, due to the current life situation of the writing. Since pure reporting is often not so exciting, it is important to be brave and to enrich them fictitiously, not only to describe locations and people of your own life story, but to be completely reinvented. And to learn to provide anecdotes with punch lines, as Billy asked Wilder: “You shouldn’t be bored!”

In the three hours of writing hours of a session, everything remains fragment. As a result, no expectation of perfection arises. Nothing is said that was written at home. There is always only what is to be heard at the session itself. Since the resulting texts are never evaluated, the meetings are only about the imaginative game with words. As a reward for your own letter, it is experienced that the listeners listen carefully as experts at the moment and spontaneously react emotionally. Since the texts are not collectively collected, the moment you experienced here applies: the stories are over when they have been thought of, written down and read out. The reading becomes a social event when I step on my own text in the social space between me and the audience and affect me.

I push new to this, sometimes paralyzes the concern that with my first text I could not suffice to a (I fantasized by me) literary group level. If I then find out when I first read first that my text is approved by individual listeners or the whole group, trust arises. The child in me, too, when the play instinct is lured from its decades of captivity, it is time to invent stories at a time and to be able to look forward to any new daring increase with the group.

I once gave a weekend seminar of Catholic adult education in the Eifel entitled “Creative Writing”. One participant brought her Italian mother -in -law, who was a fuelkeeper by profession. Neither of them touched anything at the opening coffee drink. When asked about me, they said they were too excited because they had never participated in “something like that”. On Sunday afternoon, we finally tried the Haikus Ersinnen, the short poems from Japan with only three lines: five syllables in the first line, seven in the second and five syllables in the third line. The topic was “writing”. The fuel attendant sat next to me and wrote her texts with large letters in Italian. I whispered to her that she should write down the German translation in addition to her texts and asked her in the subsequent reading round to present the Italian, then the German text variants. She did it and arrived so adorably that the group asked her not only to read her texts a second time, but also a third time, which was already done in tears. In the final feedback for the seminar, she said between laughter and crying: “I didn’t even know what I could do!”

Erhard Meueler is a retired professor of adult education. He lives and works in a small town in the Odenwald, South Hesse.