Free writing has a long history. Perhaps one of the first writers to employ it as a technique was the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. He reports: > On the afternoon of October 24th 1917, four days after my marriage,” wrote Yeats, “my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer. Yeats' wife, George, was a medium who dabbled in the spirit world. She was enthusiastic in putting her arcane abilities to the service of poetry, and averaged about 3 automatic writing sessions a week during their first three years together, producing 4,000 pages of handwriting. In 1924, the French poet André Breton published his first Surrealist Manifesto, in which he made automatic writing a core definition of Surrealism: > Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. --- In 1934, Dorothea Brande wrote "Becoming a Writer". It contains a description of free writing, an exercise to tap in the unconscious and to train the writing muscle: > So if you are to have the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious you must learn to write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant. > The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can—and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before—begin to write. > Write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember it; the activities of the day before, a conversation, real or imaginary; an examination of conscience. Write any sort of early morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically. The excellence or ultimate worth of what you write is of no importance yet. As a matter of fact, you will find more value in this material than you expect, but your primary purpose now is not to bring forth deathless words, but to write any words at all which are not pure nonsense. > To reiterate, what you are actually doing is training yourself, in the twilight zone between sleep and the full waking state, simply to write. It makes no difference to the success of this practice if your paragraphs are amorphous, the thought vague or extravagant, the ideas hazy. Forget that you have any critical faculty at all; realize that no one need ever see what you are writing unless you choose to show it. You may, if you can, write in a notebook, sitting up in bed. If you can teach yourself to use the typewriter in this period, so much the better. Write as long as you have free time, or until you feel that you have utterly written yourself out. --- In 1936, William Carlos Williams wrote an essay, "How to Write" in which he described a similar process: > One takes a piece of paper, anything, the flat of a shingle, slate, cardboard and with anything handy to the purpose begins to put down the words after the desired expression in mind. This is the anarchical phase of writing. . . . Write, write anything: it is all in all probability worthless anyhow, it is never hard to destroy written characters. But it is absolutely essential to the writing of anything worth while that the mind be fluid and release itself to the task. > Forget all rules, forget all restrictions, as to taste, as to what ought to be said, write for the pleasure of it--whether slowly or fast--every form of resistance to a complete release should be abandoned. . . . > [Critical, conscious attention to words] is dealt with in the colleges and in all forms of teaching but nowhere does it seem to be realized that without its spring from the deeper strata of the personality, all the teaching and learning in the world can make nothing of the result. . . . I am not speaking of two persons, a poet and critic, I am speaking of the same person, the writer. He has written with his deepest mind, now the object is there and he is attacking it with his most recent mind, the fore-brain, the seat of memory and ratiocination, the so-called intelligence. * * * Free writing was the core practice in Peter Elbow's 1973 book, Writing Without Teachers: > The most effective way I know to improve your writing is to do freewriting exercises regularly. At least three times a week. They are sometimes called "automatic writing," "babbling," or “jabbering" exercises. The idea is simply to write for ten minutes (later on, perhaps fifteen or twenty). Don't stop for anything. Go quickly without rushing. Never stop to look back, to cross something out, to wonder how to spell something, to wonder what word or thought to use, or to think about what you are doing. If you can't think of a word or a spelling, just use a squiggle or else write "I can't think what to say, I can't think what to say" as many times as you want; or repeat the last word you wrote over and over again; or anything else. The only requirement is that you never stop. > What happens to a freewriting exercise is important. It must be a piece of writing which, even if someone else reads it, doesn't send any ripples back to you. It is like writing something and putting it in a bottle in the sea... Freewritings help you by providing no feedback at all. When I assign one, I invite the writer to let me read it, but also tell him to keep it if he prefers. I read it quickly and make no comments at all and I do not speak with him about it. The main thing is that a freewriting must never be evaluated in any way; in fact there must be no discussion or comment at all. --- Nathalie Goldberg gave the same advice in her 1986 book "Writing Down the Bones". * * * Julia Cameron popularised the practice through her concept of Morning Pages in “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”, first published in 1992. Her website contains the following description of Morning Pages: > Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. *There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages* – they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind – and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page ... and then do three more pages tomorrow. * * * Inspired by Peter Elbow's book, author Mark Levy wrote a business book that promotes free writing as a thinking tool. It's called “Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content”. --- Most recently, Barbara Baig has written a couple of books on writing that promote free writing as a tool. They are "How to Be a Writer" and "Spellbinding Sentences". In "Spellbinding Sentences," she puts a twist on it by asking us to focus on the words we use, rather than the content. This is to build up our "word mind".