It wasn’t all that long ago that I finally developed the habit of not relying on context alone to understand a word new to me, but instead began looking it up and thinking about the dictionary definition. This way, I have added many words to my vocabulary from textbooks and articles: “synecdoche,” “vatic,” “orphic,” “hagiography,” and “heuristic” among them. I have also become fond of reading the etymology of words, sometimes of words for which I’ve never known the meaning, have never heard or read, but other times of words I use everyday, never thinking about their history. Yourdictionary.com has been of help to me.

To create new writing, I consider the word or etymology new to me and take the time to freewrite inspired by the word and its story. Then I extract a sentence or two from my freewrite that I think might get me started on an essay of interest. In this way, I open my thoughts to topics and ideas, notions and experiences I might want to write about. I write for five or 10 or 20 minutes per word. A few moments after I stop writing, I read the freewrite. Then I compose a sentence that seems to articulate something about the perception I think my writing meditation encouraged. Next, I write a sentence or two or three about what that sentence seems to indicate I must cover in an essay if I were to write one that opened with that sentence. These are kernels I am creating for developing full essays.

In 2003, I shared some of the freewrites and extractions I had done in a Writing It Real article. Here are more of them to help you find ways into new material.

Sample Words, Freewrites, and Essay Starts

1. According to Yourdictionary.com, crepuscular is an adjective pertaining to crepuscule or twilight, and means dim or weak in terms of visibility. This word can come to mind in any situation characterized by dimness: Reading at dusk without a flashlight demands too much of my crepuscular vision. In the crepuscular light of the coat closet, it was easy to mistake his coat for mine. The judge’s vision would have to be crepuscular for him to not see through the man’s excuse.

My freewrite:

Crepuscular, twilight, dim. Dim the lights, conduct romance in the shadows, the first twinkle of the stars, a letting go of what can not be seen, a softening of the wrinkles and creases around my eyes. It is the twilight of my life, we say when we know death, which we think of as “the darkness,” is near. But unless we are attentive, open and skilled, we spend only crepuscular days, not bright ones, on this planet as we block out and ward off fear, grief and pain. We say these are our twilight days as our lives wind down and then we say there is a winter of our lives just before we die. Do we not see how the darkness of night is pierced with the brilliance of stars? Let me take dim crepuscular light as the light of a hallway I walk toward myself to see more than possible among the distractions of daytime and even the sun. Crepuscular. The strong sound of the word. Let me use strength to step forthrightly toward the darkness because to call it twilight, is soft and lulling, and I may become sleepy in my task and never see the myriad of stars.

As I assess my freewrite for an essay topic, I realize I may be writing about crepuscular in a way that makes me want to talk about the value of dark days instead of the  kind of negative feeling we get when we say things are dim. My darkest days followed losing my 25-year-old son and so I strike out to say this and also use the word crepuscular in an opening sentence:

When I live with the grief of losing my son, rather than in this grief, the grief loses its crepuscular light and becomes sprinkled with the brilliance of stars, the heightened beauty of the poignancy of being far.

Now I have the task before me of showing what the difference is between living in grief and with grief. I have the task of showing the poignancy of distance and what it yields in life, which I know is a strong connection, an ability to be far and near at once. How will I get the maze of my thinking on the page so I can experience how I know this and allow others to follow my thought? That is what I will find out by writing.

2. A scenester is someone making the scene, “a really cool groupie always at the right band concerts, hanging with the right nest of other cool groupies,” according to Yourdictionary.com.
“Scenesters are identified by their drab clothes, smoking, drug use (or talk of drug use), use of cool words from in(tellectual) magazines, which they don’t know the meaning of, and lack of attention to the music at the concerts they attend. An offensive hair-do is a must, if not with spikes and bizarre colors, at least with highlights. The antonym is ‘geek.'”

This word, refers to groupies or “band aids,” who are “young people who follow bands from concert to concert and use their knowledge of the lore of contemporary bands to feed disdain for those who are not scenesters. Geeks are young people who spend their youth studying at the expense of their social life. Scenesters often end up working for geeks in later life. Ouch!”

In the 60s, “scene” took on the meaning of a situation or set of circumstances, as a bad scene (trouble) or make the scene (attend or participate in a hip event). Scenester derives from this sense of “scene.”

My freewrite:

I was certainly going to be what many would call a late bloomer. I wasn’t exactly bloomless in high school, I wasn’t what today is called a geek or even a nobody. I hung around with the second tier smart kids — the ones who wrote for the school newspaper and year book and idolized the young and dynamic biology teacher Mr. Yaeger because he loved his subject. I had some buds and some flowers opening. I won a Veteran’s Memorial Day Essay contest and read my essay at the Veteran’s hall. Only my boyfriend came because I asked him to when I found out none of my family would be in attendance. I got into college and into the honors program there. I went steady and got pinned, engaged and married. I was doing okay but I knew somehow that my growth curve toward what and who I am would be steady and long. I don’t remember wanting to make a scene, find a scene or be a scene. I wanted to work hard at something I loved, to be in love, and I wanted personal excitement. Writing has helped me find, not fame and money, but all that I have wanted.

As I read the freewrite, I see how thinking about young people makes me think about high school and the terminology my parents had for those of us who weren’t the most popular and sophisticated then. We were late bloomers. Then I see my mind connecting my examination of what it means to know you are a late bloomer with the word scenester, and I wonder how I might describe my niche today. It seems to me that I want to write about how dedicating myself to writing is the path that has allowed me to grow. It has brought to light many parts of my being. I’d like to examine the benefits of taking writing seriously and of matching my other talents and inclinations to that.

3. Furphy is a rumor; a fanciful or apocryphal story. The plural is “furphies.” The linguists suggest we replace profanities with this word as in “No furphy, I’m telling the truth.” They also suggest we give “scuttlebutt” a rest by saying things like, “The furphy flying around the office is that the boss is having an affair with some ‘Miss Givens.’ Do you know what that is all about?”

According to the linguists at Yourdictionary.com, the word can be attributed to John Furphy, a wheelwright in Shepparton, Australia, who manufactured the famous Furphy Farm Water Carts, that were converted to military use during World War I and were the Australian military equivalent of the civilian water cooler, the “gossip nexus on the front.” Men drove these carts from camp to camp during the war and delivered “as much questionable news and gossip as water.”

My Freewrite:

I think of this now as I picture so many Americans carrying their water bottles wherever they go. It seems they do not so much gather as they transition from place to place, their hydration amounts portioned out from the store or water filter at home, their days measured by the ounce, competitive, imbibing. They get their gossip online, in front to the TV. Is it really as lonely as it seems? Virtual chat rooms, reality TV, call-in radio programs, Facebook. I want to make a furphy, a water cart, something that comes around each day carrying sustenance, necessary and wet. The ice cream truck in my childhood neighborhood, the group of us gathering around. Furphies, the name of a restaurant perhaps, in a neighborhood. Come in for some water from the cart parked in the front window and a chat. Stay awhile, be seated for lunch or dinner if you wish. But stand around and talk to one another. Gossip is free and water should be. Enjoy!

This freewrite seems to say I want to talk about gathering versus non-gathering. I think this writing is interested in investigating where people do that now or if they do that. Hanging out, or hanging, as it is now called, might be the equivalent of stopping by the furphy wagon. I think I’d like to write about the need to do this, to know the folks that are going to arrive each day as well as the roll of gossip in community life. Perhaps I’d like to talk about the nature of gossip among my peers and how it differs from or is the same as the gossip I heard as a child.

4. The verb desiccate means to dry; to preserve a food by drying, to deplete of emotional or intellectual resources. The adjective, desiccated, means “without spirit or vitality.” The Yourdictionary.com linguists informed me that:

Basically, the word means “dried up.” “Cleaning out Josh’s closet, his mother …found an assortment of desiccated fruits and meats.” Metaphorically, the word may be extended to the human psyche: “Finals week and questionable study habits desiccated many students by the end of the semester.

My freewrite:

I always thought desiccated meant to mash or wreck. I’ve been thinking about this word incorrectly for a long, long time. So when my skin flakes and chaps it is desiccated. When I am tired and without energy for others or my work, my spirit and emotions are desiccated. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, I think, writes that a soul must be dry, but wild woman Sark writes about living juicy! The soul likes what is full of flavor and sound. What breaks through perfection and is crooked or a little scarred or misaligned. Soul takes root it seems in the cracks like weeds in concrete. I have to think about dry and wet, perfection and imperfection. The gods and humans. How about seed, soil, root, and flower? Flower makes fruit which releases seed, soil covers seed, root before flower.

My freewrite suggests to me that I want to write about desiccation as the opposite of being able to live and cope well and find a higher self. Those that want to detach from relationships and the senses are desiccated and those that over attach or know boundaries are soggy. How can we be juicy, which is to have lots of plump but inside our own boundaries? What does this require and why is it best? I could use the metaphor of fruit in its own skin to discuss this, but of course at some point the skin breaks and the seeds release and then all is dry. How do we keep the soul able to seed and not grow dry? Interesting to write about, I think.

5. Eke means to increase, supplement, fill out; barely gain even through hard work. The linguists write:

…this word meant to supplement, complete, fill out as in to eke out a living with a second job, but the implication of a supplement, such as a second job, implies shortage and hardship, so the next generation came to (mis)take this word as meaning “supplement by hardship.” The next generation then focused on the hardship itself, as to “eke out an existence from an abandoned mine,” which suggests a bare existence achieved through difficult labor. “Language learning is imperfect and each new generation of speakers does not comprehend the meanings of words exactly as its teachers intend them.

Although they say the word could be used as follows “The memory of their week on the Greek Isles eked out Stella’s enjoyment of their reunion dinner,” the new meaning would be used more like, “Hargrove could eke very little joy out of Gladys’ marriage to his erstwhile friend, Alistair.”

My freewrite:

Eke sounds like the sound women made in stories and cartoons when they saw a mouse. And yes, to me eke out a living meant to work hard drawing blood from a stone. It meant labor and hardship. To think that it means to supplement. I’d love to eke almost everything I treasure with something else: love with more love, visits with my new grandson with more visits, memories with more memories. Would the quantity of them scare me like seeing a mouse? No, I’d be fat with them and smile. That is why I write.

I must write an essay about eking out more memories, the how to do it and the value of doing it. I must add in the idea that eking as supplementing is an idea whose time has returned in the world as now everything moves so fast we don’t know how to hold on. Supplements are substances we add to our diet to stay healthy. How do we supplement our hearts, the reason we are living? By eking memories. I will write about this.

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Sometimes the hardest thing for essayists to do is to capture the feeling that they have something to write about. Keeping a notebook or file of words, their etymologies and the freewrites and essay starts they inspire will mean that your writing plate is full. Your decisions will be about what to work on first.