Freewriting: What It Is and How to Use It in a Draft

Freewriting is writing continuously for a fixed stretch without stopping to correct, judge or delete, used to break a stall and find material the planning mind would have refused.

The rules are the whole method: pick a length, start, and do not stop moving until it ends. No rereading, no fixing, no deciding whether it is any good. If you run out of things to say, write I don't know what to say until something else arrives. Ten minutes is the classic unit, short enough that the session starts before the resistance does.

The practice was popularised by Peter Elbow in Writing Without Teachers (1973), and it has been a staple of writing classes ever since.

What it is for

What it produces is not a draft. It is raw material, and the useful fraction is usually a line or two, which is the correct return, because the alternative was a blank page.

It works because it separates two jobs that fight each other: making things and judging them. When you draft and edit in the same breath, the editor wins and the page stays empty.

Freewriting exercises for fiction

The list of what will not happen. If you do not know what happens next, write the things that will not happen: the absurd turns, the ones you would never use. The real next move tends to surface halfway down. A widely shared list of storytelling rules by Pixar story artist Emma Coats suggests the same trick for getting unstuck.
The character talking. Ten minutes in first person as a character, answering a question like what are you most afraid I will find out? It is one of the fastest routes to their interiority, and to the gap between what they want and what they need (want versus need).
The loop. Freewrite, underline the best sentence, then start a new session with that sentence as the first line. Two or three loops will often find the centre of a scene.
The open door. If you cannot start at all, end the previous day's session mid-thought, writing the first few sentences of tomorrow's scene tonight, so there is no blank page waiting in the morning.

Common mistakes

Stopping to fix. One correction turns it back into ordinary drafting. Leave the typos.
Rereading as you go. Save it for the end, then read once with a pen.
Judging the session by its average. Most of it will be bad. You are looking for one line.
Sending it out as it is. Freewriting belongs in drafting. Nothing it produces should reach a reader before it has been revised like everything else, all the way through to a line edit.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between freewriting and brainstorming?

Brainstorming usually produces a list of separate ideas. Freewriting produces continuous sentences, and because each sentence leads into the next, it often wanders somewhere a list would never go.

How long should a freewriting session be?

Ten minutes is the classic length, and anything from five to twenty works. Short enough that you start before the resistance does is the point.

Can freewriting become part of my draft?

Pieces of it can. Treat it as raw material: lift the line or two that surprise you, then write the scene properly and revise it like everything else.