I have the same concern. My own solution, to whatever extent it is one, is to try to make my answers reasonably diverse and creative—which, yes, means doing some pruning—but also to allow myself to write a boring answer or two if it seems like I am not going to make it to 50 without doing so.
I might rationalize this by saying that the actual skill that it’s useful to train is not “babbling” or “pruning”, both of which are implementation details, but “producing lots of potentially useful ideas”, and that even taking some trouble to avoid boring answers I still find myself erring on the side of not-really-useful ideas, which suggests that whatever the underlying mental process I am at least doing something babble-ish overall.
(But that would be a rationalization. I think the actual reason is that writing boring things feels unsatisfying.)
The original Babble and Prune article at first acted on me almost like a magic creativity drug. That wore off, of course. But at first it seemed like a cure-all for blocks. However, I know from past experience that if I just let myself write aimlessly, I can produce an enormous volume of pointless crap that contains zero good ideas. This general sort of thing has been tried by many, many, many writers in the past: stream-of-consciousness, getting drunk, arbitrary rule-systems for making choices, etc. The “50 ideas for X” is another one.
And they’re probably not bad practices, but they’re also not guaranteed to produce great literature or great anything else.
I’m more interested in practices that sort of merge or dissolve the dichotomy between “babble” and “prune.”
One that worked for me when I had time to do creative writing was to write a single word or phrase, then ask, over and over again as I proceeded, “what question might my reader ask about this?” And then to answer it as directly as possible.
This was nice, because it was open-ended enough to let the ideas flow, but specific enough to give them form. Here’s a brief example off the top of my head:
He [“who is he?”]
was a shepherd [“where did he live?]
in Iceland [“when?”]
for about three weeks back in college. [“What brought him to Iceland?”]
His uncle Gunnar invited him to visit the family plot [“why?”]
after his wife died suddenly [“of what?”]
of what the postmortem determined was an aneurysm, but Gunnar claimed was because she accidentally said a kind word to him that morning. [“Hey, what’s the main character’s name, anyway?”]
Eric [“Gunnar sounds like a jerk, why would Eric want to spend time with him?”]
, caught in the terminal stages of a relationship on the verge of metastasizing to his legs and his heart, used the opportunity to flee the country back to the land of snow and wilted, overpriced vegetables.
I have the same concern. My own solution, to whatever extent it is one, is to try to make my answers reasonably diverse and creative—which, yes, means doing some pruning—but also to allow myself to write a boring answer or two if it seems like I am not going to make it to 50 without doing so.
I might rationalize this by saying that the actual skill that it’s useful to train is not “babbling” or “pruning”, both of which are implementation details, but “producing lots of potentially useful ideas”, and that even taking some trouble to avoid boring answers I still find myself erring on the side of not-really-useful ideas, which suggests that whatever the underlying mental process I am at least doing something babble-ish overall.
(But that would be a rationalization. I think the actual reason is that writing boring things feels unsatisfying.)
The original Babble and Prune article at first acted on me almost like a magic creativity drug. That wore off, of course. But at first it seemed like a cure-all for blocks. However, I know from past experience that if I just let myself write aimlessly, I can produce an enormous volume of pointless crap that contains zero good ideas. This general sort of thing has been tried by many, many, many writers in the past: stream-of-consciousness, getting drunk, arbitrary rule-systems for making choices, etc. The “50 ideas for X” is another one.
And they’re probably not bad practices, but they’re also not guaranteed to produce great literature or great anything else.
I’m more interested in practices that sort of merge or dissolve the dichotomy between “babble” and “prune.”
One that worked for me when I had time to do creative writing was to write a single word or phrase, then ask, over and over again as I proceeded, “what question might my reader ask about this?” And then to answer it as directly as possible.
This was nice, because it was open-ended enough to let the ideas flow, but specific enough to give them form. Here’s a brief example off the top of my head: