Amanda over at one of my favorite blogs,  The Sarcastic Muse, threw down a gauntlet yesterday, basically saying:  Don’t toss your gibberish in the trash.  Keep it.  Review it the next day and perhaps, surprise surprise, it will – like an oyster – reveal a pearl.  (see below for instructions)

As you guys have probably guessed, this is exactly the kind of challenge I find impossible to resist. So here’s my gibberish notebook.  It doesn’t have lines because I believe a gibberish notebook should have doodles and I don’t doodle well between the lines:

As you can see, my debut effort resulted in a battle with my stomach which I clearly lost.  But undeterred I will try again tomorrow or perhaps I’ll try to make sense of the above gibberish or perhaps I’ll just doodle some more!

Instructions stolen from the Sarcastic Muse: 

1. Get into your “happy writer zen” mode.

2. Grab your favorite writing tool and some blank or lined paper.

3. Just write– write whatever pops into your head.

4. Now the important step: PUT NO THOUGHT INTO WHAT YOU ARE WRITING.

5. Allow your stream of consciousness unconsciousness to flow uninhibited across the page(s).

6. Once the brain dump is complete, do a quick read through.

7. Make a screwed up face.

8. Say out loud “What the heck is that about?” (or just laugh out loud as though you are about to be committed).

9. Put away what you have just written and don’t look at it.

10. Once 24 hours has passed, put on your writer’s hat.

11. Pull out the written gibberish from the day before.

12. Read and dissect what you wrote.

13. Start to glean little treasures from what you have journaled.

14. If you can’t pull anything coherent from the gibberish, follow steps 10-13 again until something viable comes to light (this may take several tries).

Want to join me?  Oh, do say yes!