Tips & Tricks: Unlock Your Inner Writer with Free Writing

Posted by Taylor Roberge

I was reminded over the holidays of how difficult it can be to sit down, write, and be productive. I always feel like I will just get distracted or bogged down in trying to get all my materials out. Really I just come up with excuse after excuse to avoid writing at all costs. Oh you need help baking cookies? Here let me take the trash out. All out of butter? Let me run to the store to get some more. Everything seems to be a better option than to sit down and crank out a couple of pages of text.

A lot of this sentiment, at least for me, stems from the idea that I need to produce a near finished product on the first try. This takes a lot more time and concentration than those short 30-45 minute intervals between talking to your visiting family.

The problem of putting off writing because it doesn't seem like there will be enough time to get it near perfect on the first try is not isolated to the holidays. It has haunted me, and most likely others, countless times. That is until I started free writing. I've found that in relatively short amounts of time I can synthesize quite a bit of information. Sure its super rough, and will definitely need to be reworked, but it gets you started. You only have 15 minutes? So what? That's enough time to get a couple paragraphs down sans references that you can go back through later and probably double once you've actually fleshed out all of your fine detail.

So don't get bogged down by the need to have every reference perfect, or have each idea fully realized on the first draft. Try to get something down on paper to get going, even if it's incomplete. You'll be glad you did.