Writing Strategies — Freewriting
How ‘freewriting’ can help you get your creative juices flowing and overcome perfectionism
Introduction
This blog post is part of a series of writing strategies sourced from staff, students and researchers working at the University of Manchester Library. Try all of them out and see what works for you!
This post focuses on ‘freewriting’, and how it can help you to get your creative juices flowing and overcome perfectionism.
‘Don’t think; just write!’ — Ray Bradbury
What is freewriting?
Freewriting is a writing strategy developed by Peter Elbow in 1973 that involves writing in sentence and paragraph form without stopping, without editing and without worrying about mistakes. The aim is to get you into the flow of writing and increase the flow of ideas without engaging your critical or perfectionist side. Elbow argues that by trying to get the beginning of a piece ‘just right’, you’re setting yourself up for failure; the point isn’t to get things right, the goal is to just start writing.
Benefits of freewriting
Firstly, through freewriting, you generate an unedited draft of ideas.
This can provide an indication of how you currently understand things and how you might communicate ideas. It can also help you to identify how you might like to progress. Just starting to write can help you to clear the first hurdle if you’re feeling overwhelmed by a blank piece of paper, or the endless possibilities of a broad research topic.
Free-writing enables you to write everything that you know about a topic initially. Subsequently, as you review what you have written and refine your interests, you’re able to narrow down your research to a more specific area.
One way to do this is to free-write on a broad theme for a few minutes, then choose an idea or word from that writing as a starting point for more free-writing. This can help you to successively refine your topic and generate research questions.
Secondly, freewriting can help you to overcome perfectionism and ‘analysis paralysis’ — being too stuck in thinking something over to make progress with it. By allowing ourselves to write without worrying about getting things wrong along the way, freewriting prevents compulsive and premature editing, which can reduce confidence, and even waste time if the edited sections of writing don’t make it into the final draft.
By freewriting, and choosing not to focus on the details of phrasing and expression, you can avoid the analysis paralysis which can result from overthinking the details, to the point where the important tasks don’t get done. If you’re not sure what this looks like in practice, a common example of writing-related analysis paralysis is trying to get the introduction to a text perfect, spending too long on this section, and losing the time or motivation to write the bulk of the main text.
Freewriting can help you to generate ideas for your writing as a whole, without worrying if you’re writing ‘well enough’.
Thirdly, freewriting is a great exercise to improve writing fluency. Since free-writing is in the form of full sentences and paragraphs, it can help you to get into the habit of expressing your ideas in full sentences, rather than having fragments of ideas floating around in your mind. This can be particularly useful if you’re writing in a language other than your first language, but everyone can benefit from the thinking process involved in the act of converting ideas into fully articulated sentences.
Peter Elbow suggests that ‘Only in the end will you know what you are saying’ because you ‘must start by writing the wrong meanings in the wrong words’ until, through more writing, we ‘get to the right meanings in the right words’.
Trying to get things done perfectly at the start can also be a waste of time, because often we don’t know what exactly we’re trying to say until we’ve said it!
Amala, a second-year Law PhD student and member of the Library Student Team, agrees that the process of writing and idea development is more important than trying to get the writing perfect at the start. She says that, in her experience, free-writing has provided her with insights that led her to discard some of her research write-ups and approach her research from new angles.
Whilst switching focus may feel frustrating, as it might feel that you’ve wasted time pursuing dead-ends, Amala argues that ‘the effort of free-writing is not in vain because it gives you clarity and helps you to understand exactly what it is you want to write about eventually.’ In this way, the process of writing and the development of your thoughts through writing is more important than getting things right at the start.
Conclusion
The positives of free-writing are that it increases the flow of ideas, helps you to overcome perfectionism, and helps to increase fluency of expression. However, this writing technique is not about accuracy; the result is intended to be a first draft, so it’s more useful in some situations than others.
You may also end up with more ideas than you intended, and have to narrow the ideas down after! Don’t worry if this happens — it gives you an opportunity to practise editing, too!
There’s only one way to find which writing strategies work for you, and that’s by giving it a try!
Check out the My Research Essentials Medium publication for more writing strategies to try, or join our writing communities and write with us at our Shut Up and Write sessions and Writing retreats.
By Amanda from the Student Team
