By Mara Holt, Ohio University
Why should freewriting be so helpful if it is so easy and invites such carelessness in writing and thinking? And why does it also invite some of our best writing and thinking? First, let’s look at the easiness — in comparison with the difficulty of regular writing:
- Writing is usually judged or even graded, but freewriting is not.
- Writing usually means thinking about spelling and grammar, but in freewriting you can put all that out of mind,
- Writing is supposed to make sense, but freewriting can be incoherent or nonsensical.
- Writing is supposed to stay on one topic and be organized, but freewriting can jump all over the place.
- Writing is usually for an audience, but freewriting is private. Thus freewriting is even safer than speaking, since we almost never speak except when someone’s listening.
- Writing is usually supposed to be more important and dignified and “better” than speech. (Why take the time to write something out unless you are going to try to get it right?) But freewriting is an invitation to let words be less important and careful than speech — and to see what you can learn from them.
Thus freewriting removes all the difficulties of regular writing. But freewriting is not just easy. It is also more demanding than regular writing. For it insists on the hardest but most important thing of all: writing. But it makes that demand in a context of high safety. Thus freewriting gets us going, gets us rolling. The hardest thing about writing is to keep putting words down on paper, and freewriting makes that happen.
In addition, even though freewriting allows you to be careless or relax, it almost always heightens your thinking. That is, freewriting allows us to stop thinking about the medium of writing — about spelling and grammar and forming letters with our hand and choosing words; it makes writing as easy as speaking. And therefore it helps us devote all our thinking to what we are trying to say. We no longer need to be distracted by the process of writing.
Regular careful writing requires us to take the chaos inside our head and turn it into coherence on paper. But this is too hard for most of us to do in one step. Freewriting provides a helpful middle step: getting the chaos in our head written down. This frightens some people at first, but it turns out to be helpful to discover that it’s not so hard to write down what’s going on in your head — and not so hard to improve it once it’s written down. What’s hard about writing comes from trying to improve what’s in your head in the act of writing it down. With freewriting you have two steps to produce coherence instead of struggling to produce it all in one.
When you try to avoid bad writing, you write careful, planned sentences. In doing so, almost inevitably — despite your best efforts — you produce some sentences that are tangled, unclear, wooden, or hard to read. This happens because in careful writing you keep stopping when you are bothered by something. You try to figure out what’s wrong and try to make some change or adjustment. In all this stopping and fixing, you often lose the thread of your thought and your syntax — and you certainly lose concentration and energy. But when you freewrite, you almost never produce a difficult and tangled sentence. We have virtually never seen a passage of freewriting that we couldn’t understand easily — while we’ve seen many passages of careful writing that we couldn’t make head or tail of. And most passages of freewriting have a voice and energy and life to them.
It’s not that freewriting is always good. Far from it. But interestingly enough, it’s easier to tighten and clarify bad freewriting than bad careful writing. Try it. Find a long stretch of bad freewriting, and also a piece of careful writing that you struggled over but which is still weak or problematic. Now try to clean up both passages. You’ll discover that the careless writing is easier to fIx. The careful writing, on the other hand, is sort of delicately glued together and therefore hard to re-glue.
Freewriting is full of “wrong words.” You are writing along and get to a word and have a feeling it’s the wrong word but you haven’t got time to find a better one so you put it down. But because freewriting follows your thinking, putting down the wrong word often leads you naturally to the right word. (“I dislike him. No, it’s not that I dislike him,’ it’s that I’m always uncomfortable around him.”) For some mysterious reason, it helps many people to write down that wrong word rather than to stop their writing and search mentally for a better one.
Sometimes a skilled student objects, “But freewriting is for blocked beginners, and I’m a fluent, skilled writer already.” It’s true that freewriting is good for unskilled students, but we find that skilled, experienced writers and teachers get the most out of freewriting. It’s an exercise whose payoff increases with the expertise of the writer.
You can’t predict how freewriting will work for you. Some people start off with coherent freewriting, but as they use it, they gradually drift into freewriting that’s more jumpy and surprising. Some people start off jumpy. It seems as though better writers allow more shifts and jumps into their freewriting — and more talking to themselves. We sense that people go through stages: perhaps a stage where you write only, “Nothing today, nothing, nothing,” over and over — or some other kind of refusal to make meaning. It is important to give yourself permission for this and not measure freewriting by the quality of what you turn out. We sense that freewriting “works” in an underground way on what the writer needs to work on — but obviously that’s a statement of faith.