Resources – In Defense of Freewriting

I’m going to start this defense by laying out a few scenarios with which you may or may not be familiar:

You sit down to start a paper with a head brimming full of ideas. However, when you put fingers to keys, you can’t seem to shape any of these ideas into concrete concepts for your paper. You run out of steam before writing even a few sentences.
You sit down to write a paper and you don’t like any idea that comes to mind. You keep starting your paper and then deleting whatever you’ve written. It feels like you don’t have any good ideas, or even an idea of what that would look like. What class material is relevant to your topic? What do you know that even applies?
You have procrastinated working on this assignment for so long, you’ve now built up so much pressure around it that you can barely even look at the assignment sheet that’s been slumming at the bottom of your backpack for the better part of a month. At this point, the assignment is utterly overwhelming.

Believe it or not, you should consider freewriting as your next step in each of these scenarios.

Yep, freewriting, the true Wild West of pre-writing strategies: a place where only the rebels without a cause venture boldly into unchartered territories populated by feral pencils. You can write the same word over and over again, misspell things, throw punctuation to the wind, and even curse the heavens, so long as you don’t stop writing until the time is up.

Sound terrifying? Useless? I know. But strap on your cowboy boots and give this post a chance.

Freewriting with abandon gives you the chance to get all of your ideas out of your head and onto the paper. No longer are they promising, half-formed thoughts. Instead, they are concrete ideas you can expand and develop and rearrange.

The best thing about freewriting is that it is so flexible. You can freewrite on one piece of course reading, on one aspect of the prompt, or even on one particularly promising idea. It doesn’t have to take longer than five minutes, so what are you really risking? If it doesn’t work for you, move on; there are plenty of other techniques for pre-writing a paper.

Using Freewriting to Tackle Your Writer's Block

Questions and Exercises to Get You Started

Why do you care about this topic? Why should other people care about the topic?
What frustrates you most about this topic?
What excites you most about this topic?
What is the most provocative argument a reading makes about this topic?
Does a central theme or unanswered question of this topic particularly interest you? Why? Why do you think it is or is not important?
Does this topic have any implications for the world at large? How might your opinions on the topic affect these implications?
Does any part of this topic particularly inspire you? Why or why not?

These freewrites don’t have to be in paragraph form. You can use bullet points, outlining (which is harder, but you’re welcome to try), diagramming, whatever you want so long as you do it constantly for a set amount of time. You can then build off of your freewrites on any topic or question by choosing one or two of your favorite sentences from the freewrite and starting over.

If you’re having issues writing without stopping, try the Write or Die WebApp. I used it to freewrite for this blog post. To inspire you, and hopefully help you feel less intimidated about making mistakes while writing, I’ve included some excerpts from the aforementioned freewrite.

“Okay okay okay okay. Right. I wnat to talk about freewriitng.”
“IN all honesty, you odn’t even have to shar the product with anyone, it’s just so that you can word vomit everything that’s on your mind onto a page…”

Once you have a sloppy, profane, but complete freewrite for your paper, you should have a better idea of the “shape” of both your topic and what you want to say about it. At a bare minimum, you should have gotten at least one good idea of what you want to say about the topic, what sources you want to use, or what you want to go over with your T.A. Extract these ideas from your freewrite, archive the rest, and start working on an outline.

Thus, by investing five minutes in a freewrite, you’ll at least know what you want, what you need, or how to get there. Happy freewriting!

For Additional Information

Here are some more resources on freewriting that you might find useful:

Click here to link to a page with a five-minute countdown and a box for writing—a great place to freewrite.
Click here to link to the About.com page on freewriting. It offers additional information on how to freewrite, how to use it, and how to practice.
Click here to link to a Boundless.com page on freewriting that includes excellent examples, and a bonus section on clustering, which is another great prewriting technique.

The Writing Place