I recently dusted off a book I bought when I was maybe 16 or so, and wanting to “learn how to write.” That was back before I really understood that learning to write just means you write constantly and mercilessly, until through sheer force and mass, you make some sort of progress. Anyway, this book is actually pretty good though. It’s a series of sort of inspirational essays on writing by none other than Ray Bradbury, called Zen in the Art of Writing.

Last night I was fooling around in a notebook with one of the ideas he puts forward. Basically, you just make this huge list of nouns. Then put the word “the” in front of them. String associated ones together ad naseum. You start to move in all these weird directions, because you can’t use verbs. Just nouns. You end up with something like this:

the dog. the cat. the front porch. the garbage cans. the alleyway. the drunk. the hobo. the vice squad. the doorknob. the shelter. the landmark. the reunion. the wedding.

You get the idea. It gets very strange. You have to actually sit there and do it yourself to understand the kind of effect it has on you… It gets you thinking in a nice weird way, and it becomes weirdly addicting the longer you sit there and do it.