I can hear what you’re thinking already: Prof. Suki’s a writing teacher and she made a typo? Nope, freewriting is a single word, even if spell checker doesn’t like it!
Freewriting is a writing technique that writers use the way athletes use stretching. A runner doesn’t stretch to win a race—they stretch to get their muscles ready to win the race.
Writers use freewriting to stretch out their brains, to free up their thoughts. In freewriting, you don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or even making sense. In other words, you forget about all those things you learned about in writing class.
Freewriting is easiest with pen and paper, because all these wonderful modern tools that help us, like spell checking and cool fonts, also distract us. But you can do it with a keyboard if that’s what makes you most comfortable.
How to freewrite
- Set up a writing environment you’re comfortable with—pen and paper, writing on a tablet, or a doc on your computer
- Set a timer for 30 seconds
- Adjust your brain: you are just going to write whatever words come to you without worrying if they make any sense at all
- Start the timer and GO!
- Stop when the timer goes off (or keep going)
Pause to try it out!
How did you do?
Our goal here is just to write random stuff. That can be harder than it sounds! I hope you came up with unexpected words and ideas. Here’s a 30-second freewrite that I’m going to do right now:
bang aband oh i can’t type there is a hammer banging and it makes it hard to think birds chirping and ok i know that students are goign to read this but my vback hurts too and on top of the that the floor is being
I didn’t get much done in 30 seconds, right?
Wow, that’s crazy! I decided to type rather than handwrite because I’m typing this piece right now. You can see how bad my typing is. I actually had to stop myself from hitting backspace. As you might notice, someone working on my house is pounding on the floor. Normally, that distraction would stop someone from writing, but for freewriting, it offered me an immediate subject to write about!
Try it again…for longer
- Set a timer for 1 minute
- Adjust your brain even more: you are just going to write whatever words come to you without worrying if they even make any sense
- Start the timer and GO!
- Stop when the timer goes off
Pause to try it out!
How did you do?
Try increasing the time each time until you can freewrite for a full 5 minutes.
What’s the value of freewriting?
Freewriting loosens you up to write quickly and fluidly. Obviously, when you’re writing something important like an essay for a class or a letter to the editor of your newspaper, you’re probably not going to write like this. But writing like this will help you write more freely when you’re being more careful.
Freewriting isn’t a final product. It’s a process that makes the final product better!