Doodling is more than scrawling sketches and shapes in the margins of your notes. It encompasses any idle, unguided, and spontaneous bursts of creativity.1The exception is playing music. All musicians know that equivalent of “doodling” on your instrument is “noodling”. In a light-bulb moment a few months ago I rediscovered my love of doodling with words, and it’s now something I try to do when I have spare time. Doodling is a phenomenal way to passively develop a skill while enjoying the process.
When I was younger and played more with prose, I adored writing exercises that had me describe a scene using literary devices like similes and analogies. These often fell into the “concerted practice” bucket, but they gave me insight into the way a writer thinks, and continues to make me more aware of snippets of description or conversation that are particularly intriguing and worth noting down.
Pithy sentences, idioms, and adages can also comprise word doodles. What words seem to get to the core of an idea in the simplest way? While I’m deficient in this skill—go check out Merlin Mann for someone who I find particularly exceptional at it—it’s a trait I admire and should try to improve.
Imitation can also allow for doodling. My few satire posts are exactly this, where I’m trying to recreate the style of The Onion. One of the best ways to fully understand a tool is to try using it.
Over time, poems—particularly limericks—became my favorite word doodles. I can idly whip them up and then, just like a sketch doodle with a pencil, I can always refine it later. They delight me and force me to explore vocabulary, word length, and syllabic structure. However, the constraints in these forms require a different level of creativity and isolation of skills.
It was precisely this predilection for poetry that led to my word doodle epiphany: I thought it would be fun for Erin and her lab to perform an academic exercise of summarizing a research paper as a constrained poem, like a haiku, acrostic, or limerick. Once this idea popped into my head, I tried it a couple times myself for Erin’s preprint.
As a haiku:
Sequences fold up
Machines show variation
Mysteries unfold
And as a limerick:
With sequences not all is told:
Some stories lay within the fold!
Our model can sense
Some more divergence,
Than what we expected. Behold!
It was a short mental leap to the concept of a word doodle. I now have a separate folder to store any snippets that I hear or that occur to me while playing with writing. While a good writer is a collector of good writing, the messes made along the way are worth keeping both as a measure of progress and a source for inspiration.
Doodling is good and it’s fun. Whatever form it takes for you in the hobbies you enjoy, don’t be afraid of it. Embrace imperfect practice and results, because failing safely while trying something new is an awesome way to learn.
- 1The exception is playing music. All musicians know that equivalent of “doodling” on your instrument is “noodling”.
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