It’s an unnecessary burden to try to think of words and also worry at the same time whether they are the right words, observes Peter Elbow, a professor who pioneered the use of free writing, in his 1953 book Writing Without Teachers.
That unnecessary burden was waived off the minds of around two dozen people who attended the ‘Free Writing as a Pre-writing Technique’ workshop organised by the Qatar National Library (QNL) at the HBKU Student Centre on Thursday morning. Elbow believes, “The most effective way I know to improve your writing is to do free writing exercises regularly. At least three times a week.” After just one class, most of those who engaged in a set of writing activities designed “to encourage writing momentum” at the workshop would likely agree with Elbow.
Analogous to the warm-up you might do before starting a workout, free writing often works wonders in helping writers who cannot get started. But that’s only the half of it. As a prewriting technique, it works for anyone who wants to explore his or her writing abilities. In free writing, a person writes continuously for a set period of time without regard to spelling, grammar, or topic. It produces raw, often unusable material, but helps writers overcome blocks of apathy and self-criticism. It is used mainly by prose writers and writing teachers.
Abdallah B Saeed, Senior Writing Specialist, QNL, who conducted the workshop, told Community, “A lot of people face different kinds of problems when writing. One such problem is coming up with ideas on a set topic. This workshop focuses on the technique of free writing, and facilitates the process of brainstorming ideas and generating new ideas. Free writing is important to practice because it is an encouraging, non-threatening technique. It gives you an idea about your skills, how much writing you can do, how many ideas you can produce, and also how good your English is.”
In the class, Saeed explained how there can be focused and unfocused free writing; the writer focuses attention on a specific subject in the case of focused, and drifts into whichever direction his ideas and words take him in the case of unfocused writing.
“The point of free writing is not to generate something worth handing in – it is simply to generate something, from general ideas to specific points you want to work with,” Saeed elaborated, citing a lesson on free writing Exercises found in Elbow’s book Writing Without Teachers. “You take the time to work through all the ideas floating in your head and write them down on paper (or type them on the computer). Your first free writing experiences may generate very little that you can put into a paper, but you’ve begun writing and that it is the first essential step.”
Some of the benefits of free writing are that it helps you generate ideas, moves you past “writer’s block”, works you through ideas you aren’t sure about yet, allows you to write without worrying about “right,” “wrong,” “pass,” or “fail”, and helps to generate more words more freely.
In the book, Elbow lays down some free writing guidelines to be followed: “Set a time limit. At first, this might only be five or ten minutes. Later it may last longer. Never stop writing. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or punctuation. If you can’t think of what to say, write ‘I don’t know what to say.’ Write down whatever is in your head on the page. Don’t rush, but don’t go too slowly either. Write the words as they come to you without editing. Again (because this is important) don’t think about editing, or correctness. Don’t even think about what the next word on the page should be – just write what comes to mind, even if it doesn’t relate immediately to what you were saying before.”
While Elbow suggests free writing at least thrice a week, even just once a week can be helpful. Free writing is writing that is free – free from the burden of evaluation, correctness, and judgment. No one will look at it if you don’t want them to. You can write three pages (or more) of messy points and garbled sentences. But in those three pages, you have likely found an idea, or a phrase, or worked your way towards something worth putting in a paper that will be graded, evaluated, or judged.
As Elbow poignantly puts it: “The consequence (of writing) is that you must start by writing the wrong meanings in the wrong words; but keep writing until you get to the right meanings in the right words. Only in the end will you know what you are saying.”