Examples

Not real live teddy bear in real time examples

For some, being a talker in a TBTS setup will seem very natural, and you can just start talking. For others, finding out what comes out of your mouth as you go along might not sound like such a comfortable idea to you. TBTS is about benefiting from operating in different modes than usual, often because the environment easily and automatically gets you into a different mode. Being told "Just open your mouth and see what happens" with a real live person in front of you might not be such an environment for you. So, what might such an environment look like for you? Using a recording device as a teddy bear, writing to a teddy bear, asking the teddy bear to do some talking while having the focus be on you getting to react to what they're saying, there's all kinds of ways to include a teddy bear in your process.

For me, I’ve had a teddy bear that I’ve sent emails to. What I asked of the teddy bear was to simply respond to the emails with “I read your email." Simply having someone I was sending emails to was a game changer for me.

Dear Byron

Here's an example of how helpful it can be to have someone on the receiving end as you talk through where you’re stuck with something you’re trying to write. It's from the last paragraph of the excerpt you can find on: http://tomwolfe.com/KandyKoloredExcerpt.html

... But at first I couldn't even write the story. I came back to New York and just sat around worrying over the thing. I had a lot of trouble analyzing exactly what I had on my hands. By this time Esquire practically had a gun at my head because they had a two-page-wide color picture for the story locked into the printing presses and no story. Finally, I told Byron Dobell, the managing editor at Esquire, that I couldn't pull the thing together. O.K., he tells me, just type out my notes and send them over and he will get somebody else to write it. So about 8 o'clock that night I started typing the notes out in the form of a memorandum that began, "Dear Byron." I started typing away, starting right with the first time I saw any custom cars in California. I just started recording it all, and inside of a couple of hours, typing along like a madman, I could tell that something was beginning to happen. By midnight this memorandum to Byron was twenty pages long and I was still typing like a maniac. About 2 A.M. or something like that I turned on WABC, a radio station that plays rock and roll music all night long, and got a little more manic. I wrapped up the memorandum about 6:15 A.M., and by this time it was 49 pages long. I took it over to Esquire as soon as they opened up, about 9:30 A.M. About 4 P.M. I got a call from Byron Dobell. He told me they were striking out the "Dear Byron" at the top of the memorandum and running the rest of it in the magazine. That was the story, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby."