The Godfather of Freewriting

Novelists should dedicate a statue to this man.

His name is Peter Elbow, and his  book “Writing Without Teachers,” was a shot heard round the world when it appeared in 1973. Why? Because in it, he offers a four-lane highway to the hidden source of good writing, the place where the best stuff hides away in every creative writer:  the unconscious mind.

If that sounds a bit woo-woo for you, think…did you ever have trouble getting a piece of writing started? Or keeping up your confidence in it once you were underway? Did you ever sit down to write something REALLY important but you froze?

And were you told:  “You must not have thought it through well enough before you sat down to write?”

Well, now hear this: Peter Elbow rejected the entire notion that you should have done your important thinking before you write.

Writing is thinking, he said.

Want to think it through? Start writing immediately–and write without stopping. That will produce more good thinking than you ever thought possible.

But wait–isn’t writing like that bound to be messy? And aren’t we supposed to shun and abhor messy writing?

Elbow took that on directly:

“I find freewriting offends some people. They accuse it of being an invitation to write garbage.

“Yes and no.

“Yes, it produces garbage, but that’s all right. What is feared seems to be some kind of infection: “I’ve struggled so hard to make my writing cleaner, more organized, less chaotic, struggled so hard to be less helpless and confuse in the face of a blank piece of paper. And I’ve made some progress. If I allow myself to write garbage or randomness even for short periods, the chaos will regain a foothold and sneak back to overwhelm me again.”

Elbow recognized the reluctance to commit messy writing as a symptom of the deep complex of insecurities that kept some writers from getting their work done at all. It was a fear of not getting everything correct and getting yelled at for it.

He understood that if writing is thinking, then like all developmental thinking processes, it would move from the less evolved (garbage) toward the more evolved (brilliance).

And finally, he understood the innermost truth of  freewriting, that in garbage itself would be nuggets of gold–what I call “the good stuff”– phrases, images, and ideas so authentic they could never in a million years have been products of the formal “gotta look good” workings of consciousness.

Coming soon: how to make the right kinds of messes, and what to do with the messes you make.

Tagged as: Freewriting, good writing, Peter Elbow, unconscious mind