The Beauty of Freewriting
And Why We Should All Do It More Often
My Relationship with Writing
I have always been writing. I’ve been keeping journals since I was a little kid. However, I have never done it for public view until lately. The need to do it came from a new appetite to enter into a dialogue with others. To be honest, I used to hate dialogues, debates, confrontations. I hated expressing my thoughts out loud. There has always been that deeply ingrained fear of being criticised, of not knowing what to say back. Of coming out wrong, naive, trivial. Of not being able to provide arguments to support my stances. I could enumerate hundreds of reasons. Thank you, dear social anxiety. Fortunately, even the deepest fears can, at some point, be tamed.
Nowadays, I crave dialogue. Even about the most ordinary things. And the publicised written word is a great manner to achieve it. Exchanging thoughts with others feels to me like the most necessary part of self-development. I used to think it’s enough to devour books to learn and develop oneself. Read, read and read. Get yourself lost in fictional stories or transmitted knowledge. On the other hand, I couldn’t help noticing how much better I understand what I read and how much more I remember from a book if I talk it through with someone. The difference is substantial and I believe it lies within the process.
Writing gives me time to think first. When I’m writing, I’m facing my thoughts consciously. I’m slowly distilling what is important and what is not. It is like painting a picture of the insides of my mind but drawing many sketches first before unleashing the final outcome. That is also why it is much easier to write than speak when you are a socially anxious and introverted person by nature. This “pre-processing” of expression brings back the feeling of control.
When I write knowing that others will be reading it, I’m also learning how to express my thoughts clearly. How to disentangle the mess of different threads and give them structure. When I talk, I often get lost in my narrative. I belong to those more chaotic talkers who mean to tell one story but somehow end up telling ten different ones in the meantime. I also get emotional easily, and the emotions fly to the surface, clouding the primary message. Again, writing = control over that.
So, I noticed that I crave to write and publish. Even if only my friends are the ones who are reading my articles, the activity already provides me with this longed-for dialogue. But, at the same time, when I started writing for my Medium publication, I gave myself a particular goal. I was supposed to compose scientific-backed essays on topics I find interesting. By the time I finished and published my first article, I have already made notes about ideas for ten more essays like that. I love science, following the infinite stream of topics of interest — why do humans behave like this in a situation like that— and digging into papers, books, and everything that could help me better understand the world around me. So writing about it is something I have always wanted to do.
Afterwards, it took me a long time to write another one though. The war broke out in Ukraine and I didn’t feel like writing at all. First, it didn’t feel appropriate to do so; the topic felt improperly trivial and out of place. Second, in the first days of the war, I went into that vegetative state in which I have been passively following the news all day and night, growing alternately anxious, furious and extremely sad. I couldn’t even bring myself to read a book for leisure, let alone work on something concrete. Then, I’ve spent an entire weekend flagging bot accounts spreading fake news on social media. One way or another, I felt unable to go back to the unfinished article. I got down to my journal and started pouring out the emotions there.
And that’s when I understood. I need to write freely. I’m not able to confine myself to one topic or style of writing. Moreover, why would I do so? I’m not writing here to build a certain image of myself. I’m doing it primarily for the sake of what it gives me. For the sake of everything that I described above. And also, with the hope that I give something to my readers. Maybe food for thought. A feeling of shared experience if they “find” themselves in my words. An idea. All these things that I get when I read other people’s words.
Writing without Bounds
I’ve been thinking about how to define this activity of writing without predefined rules, subjects, form. With a starting thought, but without knowing where the writing process will lead me. The best matching term I found is “freewriting”. Merriam Webster’s dictionary describes it as “automatic writing done especially as a classroom exercise”. The first known use of the word in print is from 1980. According to the dictionary, this year words such as techno-pop, ecoterrorism, foodie, voice mail and post-traumatic stress disorder have been printed for the first time. I don’t know about you, but I find the etymology and history of language fascinating.
Just notice how much these five words already tell us about that moment in time. On one hand, we have a luxurious foodie, coined by a food critic, Gael Greene in the New York Magazine in the article about la cuisine bourgeoise. On the other, a voice mail, a technological revolution of its time. “None of the potential voice-mail contenders, however, will admit that they have voice-mail systems under development”, Business Week was reporting cryptically [1].
Next comes the ominous ecoterrorism. This term is especially interesting because of two completely opposing definitions:
1: sabotage intended to hinder activities that are considered damaging to the environment.
2: political terrorism intended to damage an enemy’s natural environment.
The first recorded use of the term in print may have to do with the founding of Earth First! in 1980, an organisation that was supposed to take an “uncompromising, militant stand in defense of the environment” [2]. Described in the press as a radical preservationist group [3], it has been famous for actions such as tree spiking, machine wrecking and tree-sitting protests [4]. Based on this information, I assume the second meaning is the more recent one, probably born in our new millennium. The founder of the group, David Foreman, once said: “In the Watt era, we have to balance extremism with extremism. Then you compromise in the middle” [5]. Somehow, after reading these words, the inner contradiction preserved in the understanding of the term seems less contradictory.
And then, the post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD). This one was the biggest surprise to me, as I didn’t think it could be such a recent term (if we consider 40 years ago to be recent). But, it again brings us a piece of history — the Vietnam war. The condition has been known to psychologists already in the 50s, but only in 1980 it has been described under the PTSD term in the DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, handbook of criteria used by mental health care professionals to guide diagnosis of mental disorders). In that time, PTSD has been used interchangeably with the term Vietnam Syndrome. When I look through the press reports from that year, most of the excerpts concern court trial stories about a withdrawal (or lack of it) of charges against war veterans on the grounds of PTSD.
We may ask ourselves, how did the freewriting land up in this situation? Meaning, why precisely then? I honestly do not know. Maybe the history of literature could give us some answers. Maybe it was just in line with the spirit of the times. During this year, a series of workshops were held with the aim of teaching people how to write without knowing the meaning first. To let the words flow without constraints and to figure out what you want to convey only during the process of writing. The workshops were then described in the New York Times in a story under the soothing title “The Fears of Becoming A Writer Can Be Easily Erased”[6].
See what I have done above? Exactly that, the freewriting. The words and topics just come as they go and go as they come. No predetermined direction, structure, no judging after every sentence. And I even ended up writing about life curiosities employing some research after all. That’s what freewriting is. You don’t know where it will take you. But it will surely be a fascinating place. Let us all do it more often.
References:
[1] Voice mail arrive in the office. Business Week, 1980, McGraw-Hill. https://books.google.nl/books?id=Sr9IAAAAYAAJ
[2] Eagan, S. P. (1996). From spikes to bombs: The rise of eco‐terrorism. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 19 (1), 1–18.
[3] Magnuson, K.M., Earth First: ‘’Crack the Dam’’. United Press International. May 19, 1983, PM cycle.
[4] Tree sitter risks life to save timber, United Press International. July 12, 1985, Friday, AM cycle.
[5] The Ecological Green Berets, Newsweek. July 19, 1982, UNITED STATES EDITION.
[6] Giachero, E. The Fears of Becoming A Writer Can Be Easily Erased, The New York Times, September 21, 1980, Sunday, Late City Final Edition.
