Five Minute Drills

I'd like to take the time to introduce you to what will be a regular addition to this blog going forth. It could be something some of you will enjoy and others will routinely skip, which I'm alright with. As part of my committment to putting more work into my writing, I will regularly be doing five minute drills, and publishing the creations here for your amusement.

The five minute drill is my favorite writing excercise, which I first learned about years ago. The premise is extremely simple. You have five minutes to write as much as you possibly can. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT stop to think. Simply let the words flow out of you as freely as you can for a full five minutes. Quality is utterly unimportant (of course, you're expected to make intelligible sentences). Quanitity is the name of the game here. When your five minutes are up, you are allowed to reach the end of your sentence, but that's it. However, if I find myself on a full-blown creative tear I keep going to get out as much as I can, since it could turn itself into a full story later.

This writing excercise is a great way to warm up the writing parts of your brain, and actually enhance your creativity by putting the emphasis on getting out as MUCH as you can and not being so damn concerned about if it's any GOOD. Editing and quality control can come later. Focus purely on the act of creation for starters.

Some of my five minute drills could be quite good, some may be complete crap. I'll be posting them here with the post title "Five Minute Drill" and the date. Don't worry, I don't consider these a substitute for regular blog content, so they will be seperate from normal posts so those who have no interest in reading them can skip them, and so it's clearer when I'm making "normal posts." They obviously won't be super long, since they contain only what I can type in five minutes, but hopefully they'll entertain and spark someone's interest in writing just a tiny bit.

Without further fanfare, I present my first five minute drill of 2010. I haven't done these in a while, so the results should be... interesting LOL. Remember, they may not be completely coherent, they won't tell a whole story... It's all about what can be written in five minutes. I'm going to get better at these as I get back into the habit of doing them.

Note: I may save up several and combine them into one longer post to prevent spamming my own blog with too many "side-posts."

Five minute drill 01/03/2010

The girl smiled as she leveled her pistol at the creature, a slightly evil grin spreading across her face, one Kaiden has seen just a few times too many in recent months. She'd worn it when the entered the hive. When they killed the queen. When they drive the Killiks to the deepest corners of their own world. And she wore it again at the warrior who was chained down to the cold stone floor.

"Melissa, are you okay?" Kaiden asked.

"Better than okay." She said, her eyes never leaving the insect-like creature struggling against its chains before her. If Kaiden could read Killik body language, he would have thought it was asking for mercy. "This is one of the last of the warrior class. If we can extract from it the location of their last hive, they're as good as extinct."

At her words, the creature threw fresh vigor into unloosing its chains. To both sides, marines drew swords and neatly severed two of the insects six legs, then switched to cauterizing sticks to seal the wounds before the creature could bleed out. It let out a screech that sent waves of pain through Kaiden, but its struggles ceased.