A Writing Tip by Federico Escobar
DIM THE SCREEN TO TURN OFF YOUR BRAIN
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
There is a well-intentioned person who gets in the way of my ideas bursting onto the page. This person is eager to please, wants to make sure I use the right term every time, and is convinced that a semi-poetic line can become the best version of itself if I just stop and tinker with it a while. That person is, of course, me.
To get this zealous fellow to stop and let me write, I took a wonderful card from Meg Pokrass’s endless Rolodex of tips and tricks. Two, actually. One was her suggestion to write with a black screen. It’s simple, really. Here’s Meg Pokrass: “Go to ‘brightness’ in Settings and turn it all the way down so that you can’t see/edit what you are working on.” This is VERY uncomfortable at first. The first time I tried writing with a black screen, I dimmed down, tapped up, dimmed down, tapped up, just to check if writing was actually getting done in the cosmic darkness before me. And then, well, you just let go. If I had done any bungee jumping in my life, I would say that this feels like bungee jumping. Exactly like it, in fact.
The second card from the Rolodex is to use prompt words. This is trademark Meg Pokrass. You can create your own list or use a random prompt word generator online. I jot them down on a Post-it note next to the keyboard. Prompt words are good in general, but with black-screen writing they’re a great tool to gain momentum. And black-screen writing is all about momentum. I’ve gotten flight velocity a few times, and when the brightness settings go up, there are, impossibly, a thousand words emerging from the darkness.
Cleaning up the mess is fun at that point. Of course there are typos! Of course quotation marks are all over the place! Of course a name is misspelled every time! I mean, it was a black screen. Not a dash of judgment goes into the batter. And that’s my writing tip. Get momentum with prompt words, and do some high diving into a black screen.
Federico Escobar grew up in Cali, Colombia, and has lived in New Orleans, Jerusalem, Oxford, and Puerto Rico. He has published short stories and poems, as well as academic articles and translations, in both Spanish and English. His literary work has been published or is forthcoming in Cabinet of Heed, The Phare, Bending Genres, Passengers Journal, Typishly, Tulane Review, HermanoCerdo, Revista Eñe, Sad Girl Diaries, and Stone’s Throw Magazine. He currently works in education.
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