Scribble Your Way to Liberation: Clicktappity

Use this technique for: when you’re in front of a computer and your brain is feeling fuzzy.

Starting point: when you pull up whatever file you want to type in.

Ending point: whenever you feel like stopping.

Why the resistance?  Why the revulsion?  What am I beating myself against that is making things so difficult?  Could just be the caffeine, admittedly.  (I am taught how to spell things correctly by the absence of little red lines.)

Free writing techniques do not always have to be confined to paper and pen.  The main point of free writing is to get thoughts out of your head and into words and if typing works, use it.  Clicktappity is simply my weird little term for typed free writing.

You can put all your Clicktappity into a single designated file for that purpose, using whatever word processing program you find yourself comfortable with.  Alternately, you can open a new file for each session and either delete or save the results.

If you have a workplace that permits short breaks on the Internet as long as work gets done, you can make use of online services and thus avoid having a file on your work computer for someone to come across.  At one point, I was using a webmail account to send an email to my home email account and poured my random thoughts into the email.  These days, I’ve gotten quite fond of Google Docs for this purpose as well.  (If you do end up saving a file to your work computer, title it something dull, place it somewhere you can remember, password protect it if possible and delete it the moment you depart from that job permanently.)

It’s perfectly okay to hit the backspace key now and then to correct a word, but don’t cut out entire lines as if you’re editing something for publication.  That’s not the point of this.  Clicktappity is pouring your thoughts out via the keyboard for your eyes only.

You may find that this will help improve your typing.  This is not a bad thing.

Clicktappity can be short bursts or long rambles, depending on how much is on your mind.  I find it can be a useful way to take a break when I’m confined to a computer for long stretches and have a large and complicated project to work on.  Giving myself five minutes of Clicktappity for, say, every twenty minutes of adding stuff to spreadsheets makes the whole thing much more bearable.

Techniques like the Shit Book and the Sub-C Session can also be done by typing.  These are best done in separate files than from regular Clicktappity (especially the Shit Book—in fact, the best thing to do with a Shit Book file is to close it without saving it once you’re done.)  Three Daily Pages could conceivably be done by typing, but I’ve never done it that way because it’s a little hard to gauge how much a ‘page’ is and when to stop.  (Plus, one power outage can screw up everything—at least with a paper notebook you can keep writing by candlelight if it comes to that.)

A revised version of this entry can be found in the ebook Catbooks and Other Methods.