Mark Andrew Levy

Freewriting is one of the most valuable skills I know. It’s a way of using your body to get mechanical advantage over your mind, so your mind can do its job better.

By giving yourself a handful of liberating freewriting rules to follow, you back your mind into a corner where it can’t help but come up with new thoughts. You could call freewriting a form of forced creativity.

One of Writing with Power’s chief techniques was free-writing, which I’d experienced in high school when teachers assigned it as punishment if the class was noisy, or to occupy us when they wanted to go to the teachers’ lounge and smoke. I thought of freewriting as hollow busy work.