You’ve probably heard of “freewriting.“ Here’s what you do:
You sit down, you get comfortable, and you start writing. Some people set a timer for 10, 15 or 20 minutes before they start. Because the game is, you don’t stop writing during those 10, 15, 20 minutes, even if—especially if—you don’t know what to write. If that happens, you write, "I can’t think of something to write,” or whatever. You also don’t go back to correct anything, even typos. In freewriting, there is no concept of a “mistake,” because once you’re done, you just throw it away. You don’t even read it yourself, unless you feel like it.
The point of the exercise is to expend no effort except for the physical effort of writing or typing. Your goal is not to choose words so much as spew words out. Think of it as the writing equivalent of finger-painting. It’s an exercise in not giving a shit.
This is the best way I know for reducing anxiety around writing. Peter Elbow suggests scheduling it at least three times a week. Personally, I don’t schedule it; I do it at random moments during the day when it occurs to me. This addresses my sense that writing is very difficult to start. If you get into the habit of just dropping what you’re doing and spontaneously writing something, writing starts to seem like less of a big deal.
If you want, you can relax the rule about not stopping. I found that if I told myself “I can’t stop!” I made myself anxious—“oh my god, I’ll be trapped doing this thing for ten minutes!”—which impeded my willingness to do it at all. So allow yourself to stop if you need to—but just to rest, not to think.
Freewriting can be practiced for as short a time as you have—five minutes, thirty seconds, however long you can tolerate it or spare. You can do it while you’re on hold or waiting for a file to download. Or you can put a reminder on your phone. Every day, every other day, every other other day, whatever. If you ultimately want to “make writing a habit,” you could pick a time slot and just fill that slot with freewriting for now. That will certainly build a habit, and it asks almost nothing of you except to sit in a chair and move your fingers until your timer goes off.
Well, okay: it asks slightly more of you than that. Freewriting is similar to meditation or mindfulness practice: you do have to focus, and mainly you focus on what’s in your head. For some folks, that can be uncomfortable. If it is, try to focus on the words and not on you. If you can’t stand your own thoughts, describe what you see around you instead. Or think of the words as grit that has collected inside you that you’re flushing out—like turning on a faucet to clear rust out of the pipes. The words are already there, so when you freewrite, you’re just discharging them. Those words aren’t you, they’re just words.
I offer you this rusty pipe metaphor because it has helped me a lot. Writing, for me, has always meant feeling my lack of worth in its fullest intensity—as if every word I write were declaring my mediocrity. So of course I avoided it. But if I think of the words as grit in a pipe, my self—my own abilities and my own psyche—are not at issue. Just caked, rotten, crusty words that need to be dissolved, loosened and washed out.
Freewriting has a few purposes, according to Elbow. As I said, it trains you to decouple your words from you, to write with less fear that what you write reflects on you. It accustoms you to producing “bad” writing and seeing that the world doesn’t end. It teaches you to make mistakes without fear—or rather, to write without “mistake” vs. “correct” even entering the picture.
The real point of freewriting is just to practice spontaneously generating words. Merely generating words, it turns out, is difficult and demanding before you even ask whether they’re the right words. Many of us (though not all) can generate words with relative ease when we talk. But for reasons that are mysterious to me, writing doesn’t work like speaking. Maybe it’s because you have more time to choose your words when you’re writing—and there’s nobody sitting there, responding to what you say. The point is, the channel between your brain and your typing/writing hands can get stiff and clogged. So the first step toward writing without pain and anxiety is simply to loosen and unclog that channel. You’re not even building a skill, you’re just stretching a muscle.
I find when I freewrite that after a few minutes, my mental state shifts. I go into a sort of trance in which things are happening in my mind and I’m observing them but I don’t feel like I’m controlling them. Which, for someone who lives her life with an iron grip on her every thought and deed, is an enormous relief. Once I stop freewriting and start writing normally, some of that lightness lingers. My mind and body remember the sensation and can return to it even when I write more slowly and deliberately.
If writing is extremely difficult for you, you might need to do nothing but freewrite for a while. You might need the sustained experience of producing words that won’t be evaluated, that can’t be evaluated. Even once you start writing normally again, you could still spend the first few minutes of your writing time freewriting, just to clear the pipes.
Try it. Try freewriting for thirty seconds. Right now. Just open up a new document or grab an empty junk mail envelope and see what it’s like.
Next post: how not to do too much at once
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