The importance of  freewriting and how to do it.

I heard myself sigh when I set the clock. Time to write. Time to freewrite. What’s so free about it? I’ve been barren of words.  How is that even possible — after years of writing — when it feels like I must know all there is to know about generating words?

There’s some kind of curtain that crashes down when I cast my mind forward searching for meaning and sense. My mind returns and says, there’s nothing there. 

I try to see in my mind’s eye where the words, not yet written, will go, and I find the end point wanting, and so I say, nope, nothing there.  

But I know good and well that my mind’s eye doesn’t know – can’t know. Because it is the freewriting – the 15 minutes of being willing to enter the unknown and the uncertain that allows me to come out with writing at the end. 

Writing things down without knowing where you’ll end up, allowing yourself to wander, uncertain, exploring what you have to say, is a way to strike gold – actually, a way to create gold, again and again.  

I think that one of the tricky things about words is that they contain meaning and so I get caught up in laying down meaning and knowing. But words are also sound.

The day that I finally sat down, feeling barren of words, I started playing with the words – not as carriers of meaning, but as objects in and of themselves.

Instead of stringing the words together in sentences, I let each word hang out on a line, or maybe a couple words start playing together.

What emerged was a free association like….BE. Be. Buzz. ZZZZZZZZ, zipper. Zero. zounds. Zillow…..and I was off, starting to feel the curtain lifting and meaning emerging from the sounds and the letters cavorting in front of my eyes.

I re-remembered that freewriting isn’t just about setting a timer and writing for 15 minutes about what you’re thinking. Freewriting, also called automatic writing, is an invitation to play with sound, with letters, with phrases and let meaning slowly come into focus. 

So I invite you to give it a try when you’re stuck and wanting to get some writing moving. Set a timer, pick up a dictionary, cast about in your mind for a favorite rhyme or phrase, write it and let the words call to each other.

Let me know how it goes. Also, freewriting is one of the tools I use in my group coaching workshop, you can find out more about that here: Journaling Your Values, Vision & Voice.