The Writing "Noodle"

If there's one thing in writing that I both enjoy and need, it's the exercise of the writing noodle. Yes, it sounds weird and possibly very silly, but once I discovered it and how to play with it, I set aside all the pasta jokes and instead figured out when the best times would be for me to get out the noodle, if you will. This doesn't necessarily apply to any one writing genre, any particular kind of writing (though it helps with poetry in particular), or developing a personal style. It does, however, help one strengthen both their creative process and their capacity to go beyond what the rules normally allow for.

Now, surprisingly, this has no connection to "using the old noodle," referring to putting the brain to work. In some ways it's quite the opposite. This actually hearkens back to the musician practice of "noodling around" - just finding a chord and playing around with it, trying different tempos, transitions, and whatever the musician feels like, usually all done while playing non-stop, not breaking for a retry or stopping because something is "wrong." At times this will create a chaotic scramble of notes, sometimes it's just another refrain that sounds like any other. However, such noodling taps into the musician's creativity, and the experimentation lets the mind explore the world outside of what they know. Some famous noodling creations have been the famous keyboard riff on The Doors' "Light my Fire" and the lead guitar piece on The Pretenders' "Back on the Chain Gang." That's just a modest sampling of the many songs where the artist says, "Well, I was just noodling around, and suddenly..." The rest is history.

With writing, it's fairly simple. You pick a word, preferably one that has some flex to it, such as "Chance." Chance can be a verb, a noun, a descriptor - at this point it's your choice. You then just start writing things about the word, the different meanings, the interpretations, even simple arguments against things being "chance" events will suffice. Start writing the lyrics to Johnny Mathis's "Chances Are" and rework them into your own song about chance. Offer a simple, playful riff on ABBA's "Take A Chance on Me," or talk about former Chicago Cubs player-manager Frank Chance. Find all the words you can that rhyme with chance, then write about how those words might be connected. The mission is to explore the word, massage it like bread dough, look at it from all directions, and engage with its many purposes and meanings. 

Again (and I cannot state this enough), you will likely end up with a lot of gibberish, and a bunch of sentences that mean very little or carry no real value. That's fine - that's actually the purpose here; to create as much as possible without worrying about the way it should be done. You could spend all your time noodling around and end up with tired fingers, or you might just hatch a little gem like:

Chance is knowing the
rarity of true beauty
is still possible

Was that a great haiku? Meh - to each their own. Whether you come up with something as good or better doesn't matter. What matters is exercising your creativity, and knowing you will not find those things when you don't try. Happy noodling.