Invitation to Write #13- Original Form

As the sole non-English major of the contributors to this blog, I am sometimes on guard about my form. I will post hesitantly to my writing group, or to this blog, and apologize for a wonky form or structure in my piece. My fellow authors always tell me not to worry about it. I believe one of them once told me, fuck form! We have a rule amongst the TrailBrazens: No apologies. And while we seem to have gotten out of the habit of literal apologies, we sometimes qualify our writing in words of explanation, as we post.  I can't for the life of me recall where I read this recently. Nevertheless, I read somewhere that women use qualifiers in their writing, much more than men do. We tend to utilize words like perhaps and actually, when we should boldly say what we need to say. No qualifiers. No apologies. Though this is not the original source from which I read about the idea, here is a pretty simple online article about it: How Women Undermine Themselves with Words.

In celebration of our Brazen roots, in a quest to unapologetically be who we want to be, with a loud and proud FUCK FORM! I give you the lucky number 13 Invitation to Write. It comes from Pat Schneider's book Writing Alone and with Others. The idea is to create your own original form. That's it. Make it up. Write whatever you want to write and create your own form for doing it. Schneider says to make it "difficult, exacting, challenging... being as hard on yourself as possible, allowing yourself no easy solutions to difficult tasks." She provided the example below from one of her workshop participants (pg. 137). Go for it... be Brazen!