The Freewriting Way of Life

Freewriting challenges the yearning for control in a rather obvious fashion. It requires you to abandon the method of “figuring out something good or clever to say before writing anything down” and to replace it with “writing things down without knowing if anything good or clever will come out.” Rationally, this shouldn’t be a big deal, since nobody else will ever see your freewriting; I generally only use what I produce as guidance for a subsequent draft. Yet as Elbow notes, we seem to fear a kind of contagion, as if writing messily for 10 minutes might infect all our work with messiness. And lurking below that lies the fear that letting go might spell disaster: that you’d end up lounging on the sofa all day, eating crisps, achieving nothing of value. Or even that your entire self might somehow unravel into nothing, were you to stop so effortfully trying to hold it together.

And yet look at what actually happens in freewriting, once you allow yourself to let go: more output, creativity, solutions and insights. The very things you’d hoped to achieve by clenching hard and trying to control reality. Freewriting does involve relaxation, but it’s not the relaxation of lassitude or passivity. It’s more a matter of getting out of action’s way, so that your whole self, no longer so constrained by your controlling ego, can bring forth the most of which it’s capable.

Hopefully by now it’s clear why this has relevance beyond writing. You might speak, for example, about the “freewriting approach” to personal change: not trying to devise a detailed plan for guaranteed success before diving in, but diving in now, then course-correcting based on your experiences. (“Acting is a form of planning,” as Dan Pink puts it.) Or the freewriting approach to difficult conversations: setting the intention to be honest and authentic, but then just going for it – as opposed to, say, getting ChatGPT to prepare talking points in advance, so you can steer things the way you’d prefer.