Freewriting For Great Ideas
This article is for: Beginner and Intermediate poets
In this article, I’m going to introduce you to one of the most important skills you’ll ever need as a poet.
Freewriting is so fundamental to my writing practice that I literally can’t imagine creating a poem without it anymore. And once you start using it, I think you’ll feel the same way too.
Improve your poetry fast!
Get your free eBook with my top poetry tips:
8 Steps To Better Poems
Freewriting is a way of capturing your best thoughts and ideas, without any attempt to judge them or shape them. It’s a way of creating raw material, oodles of yummy words, that you can pick and choose from later when you come to create an actual first draft.
And it’s a quite brilliant tool for adding depth and sparkle to your ideas, at any stage of your drafting process.
So here’s the lowdown on what it is, how to do it, and how you can use it to give extra pizzazz to all your poems!
What is freewriting?
Simply put, freewriting means writing as quickly as you can, attempting to record every thought that occurs to you as you write.
Whether you’re using paper or computer, you get ready to write, put down whatever thought is in your head first, and just keep going!
Along the way, you don’t worry about spelling, grammar, complete sentences, or even sense—you just do your best to catch all the little whispers of thoughts that are flying through your head.
And you definitely don’t worry about any kind of “quality” in what you’re writing.
The freewrite is not going to become a poem itself, and you’ll never have to show it to anyone else! The idea of a freewrite is only to catch your thoughts, without choosing or filtering—just writing.
If you get stuck, you do your best not to stop, but keep writing anything at all—even “cabbage cabbage cabbage cabbage” if you like—until another idea occurs to you, that you can follow.
Ideally, a freewrite should move as freely and weirdly as our thoughts do, sometimes with periods of sustained thinking about one topic, but often with leaps, jumps, maybe even random wordplay coming in.
Basically, as long as you keep writing, and keep listening to the thoughts entering your mind, you can’t really go wrong.
Freewriting will give you ideas you never thought you had, and enrich your poetry hugely.
What does a freewrite look like?
Here’s the beginning of one of my freewrites, done on a laptop (I can’t write fast enough by hand):
Freewrite yes why not my laptop wanted me to write freedom at that point freedome is what I am affter freedome! What a doner wonderful idea the freedome ofhe dome of the cathedral in milan or in that other Florence that ‘t it Florence Kati’es fried must return that book sos short like a stalled run out of steam maybe shoud put on the kettle make clouds of steam way to fill myself with steam bloody hell battery out already tea is consended steam it cimes from the iundustrail revelation the revelation of how much power there was in things from under the grounds…
I started with the idea of freedom that came up on my computer’s autocorrect, but because I mis-spelled it “freedome,” my thoughts moved to cathedrals in with domes in Milan and Florence, which then made me think of a woman named Florence whose book I’d borrowed. Then for some reason SOS came into my head—I’ve no idea why, but I wrote it down—and that led to thoughts of things that are “short,” and the word “short” sounds a bit like “stalled,” which led me to the idea of “run out of steam,” which led to kettles, then the idea of steam power in the Industrial Revolution! (And that was just the first couple of minutes—the whole freewrite is about three times that long.)
I hope you can see that my ideas move around pretty fast, and I’m not asking myself whether any of them will be “good” or “useful.” I’m just writing, and having faith that, if I keep going fast and loosely enough, I’ll hit good ideas eventually.
One thing is for sure: in this freewrite, I uncovered a whole bunch of thoughts I didn’t know I had!
Now I can take any of these and put them into a poem. Without the freewrite, I couldn’t do that.
Why does freewriting work?
While freewriting is a simple idea, it's a very powerful technique, because:
It is a sensitive instrument for catching the dartings of your unconscious
The unconscious mind is where your most exciting and “alive” ideas emerge from. You definitely want techniquews that can help you tap into it! And freewriting is a great one.
When you are working on a really 'free' freewrite, you will find yourself almost out of control at times: leaping sideways again and again, putting in the unexpected, the bizarre, the surprising links that your unconscious is always suggesting, and that normally we screen out.
This means that you’re harvesting all the wonderful associations and innovative links that your unconscious is brilliant at making—and our conscious minds are equally good at dismissing.
Don’t dismiss them! Freewrite, learn to listen to your unconscious, and let it fill your poetry with imagination and power.
Moreover, the more you freewrite, the better you’ll get at it.
It’s a skill, like learning to cook or play soccer. At first it may be slow and even frustrating, but as you do more you should find that your freewrites become looser and faster, and more responsive to the whispers at the side of your consciousness.
When should you use freewriting?
This is an easy one: All the time!
No, really, it’s true. You can use a freewrite at any stage of the drafting process, except perhaps the final editing and polishing.
The most common time to use freewriting is when you’re looking for a place to begin a poem. In that case, you’ll be aiming to let your mind move as freely as you can, as freely as I was in my example freewrite, so that you can find out the exciting things you didn’t even know you were thinking. These ideas can make great seeds for first drafts
However, if that’s the only time you use freewriting, you’re missing out!
I would say that, even when you’ve already got a beginning point already you should still freewrite on your first idea or draft in order to expand your ideas.
For example, suppose you’ve jotted down a first draft in your notebook about a news story that moved you. Should you now move to editing and revising? No! Your next step should be to freewrite all you can think of about that topic, in case there’s more hiding in your unconscious. And there will be! There always is, and it’s usually the best stuff.
Even further down the drafting process, freewriting is still your friend. Suppose you have a single line in a draft that just isn’t working. You could try fiddling about with it, adding an adjective here, changing a verb there… Or, you could freewrite on whatever topic you need to address, and see what you get. I’ll bet the freewriting version gets you stronger results.
You can also do successive freewrites: freewrite once to find an initial idea, then do another freewrite that focused on that new topic.
Wait a minute—how can you freewrite “on” a fixed topic?
Maybe you spotted a problem with what I was just saying?
The idea of a freewrite is to let your mind move totally freely—so how can a freewrite be “on” a single topic? Won’t it move around too much for that?
Well, yes and no. You might think of freewriting as being like taking a dog for a walk.
If you’re in an open wild space, you can let the dog off the leash completely, and let it go where it wants. That’s like a completely free freewrite.
But if you’re on a public common, you might need to keep the dog on a long leash, giving it some freedom, but keeping it within a certain distance of you.
That’s how a more “focused” freewrite works. You start with a topic in mind, and let your mind go at first—but if it starts to wander totally away from your topic, you gently bring it back to your main topic, and see if it has anything new to tell you. This is like a gentle tug on the dog’s leash.
Here’s the beginning of one of mine, using 'water' as a starting point:
Water that will not enter me it can not enter me I am dry there is n o water inside me. Iknside you there is no shortage of it; you are not an ocean or a pool but a river no you are not tha't s a stereotypical image of a woman yet you are filled with ater though you are not made only of it limpid pools of it the lucent simpled dimpled flesh a leaf's fall a srtuggling peacock butterfly making violent ripples for a few seconds then giving up then trying again and this is an image of me of me trying to escape from the shining,, reflective, unmeasureable surafce of you ans esee how there is no depth to water it all reflects off it and yet also there is nothing but deopth there is nothing but a region we can not enter I can not enter where this year there are no fish and the may-flies and other flies sim and skim and dance and are not eaten and the dying butterlfy is left to drown without being eaten swallowed…
Mainly about water, as you can see, but also going into other areas, like relationships and a dying butterfly!
This kind of freewrite still gives you many new levels of depth and complexity for your poem, but within the context of the topic or idea you want to work with
Next Steps
If you’ve never done freewriting before, start now!
All you need is 5 minutes and a way to write.
Get physically ready to write (pen, paper, laptop, whatever you need).
Put down whatever’s in your head (for example, “this is silly it will never work what am I doing”)
Then follow on with whatever thoughts come next
Keep writing for 5 minutes, and don’t stop! Write nonsense if you have to, until another thought comes.
When you run out of steam, stop.
Read back through the freewrite, looking for phrases and ideas that seem to have a “spark.” Use one or some of these to start a poem.
If you have used it before, try to find some new way you can use it.
For example, do an extra freewrite before you start your second draft, and see what happens!
