Why F-R-E-E-Write? by Orna Ross
“Don’t go to workshops. The workshop is the death of writing. No one should attend a writing workshop ever.”
Whoa! Who is this? Some old duffer of the writing-can’t-be-taught school, who would never expect, say, a violinist or a painter to emerge, talent fully honed, without training or peer feedback? No, it’s bright-young-thing Scarlett Thomas, being quoted in Mslexia no less, by media journalist, Danuta Kean.
I love to read other writers’ opinions about writing – it’s one of the many joys offered each quarter by the excellent Mslexia: The Magazine for Women Who Write. The endless variety in how words are written, and read, means there’s always plenty of room for argument. Again – usually, a pleasure.
But “disagree” doesn’t come close to how I feel about this declaration of Scarlett Thomas’s.
I detest it.
And I distrust it — most especially because it purports to be writing advice, appearing as it does in the magazine’s regular feature, “100 Ways to Write a Book”.
Imagine a tyro writer, with little to sustain her but a dream, an intuition that writing is what she longs to do. Like all dreams and inner promptings, this urge feels insubstantial when held against the solidity of the already created outer world. She is browsing in a bookstore when she finds Myslexia magazine and buys it, hoping for encouragement and stimulation, motivation and support. What she gets is the cold blast of Ms Thomas condescension, declaring: “I can guarantee you that Tolstoy or Shakespeare never went to a writing workshop.”
Of course they didn’t, cries our aspirant writer, casting the magazine aside. How deluded is she? She’s not Tolstoy, she can never be Shakespeare. Forget it.
No, no, no, I scream to her in my head. Don’t listen. Scarlett Thomas may have published some successful novels but when it comes to facilitating other people’s writing, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
Gaps in the historical record make it impossible to know the exact working methods of those two long-dead writers but we do know that Shakespeare was an obsessive tinkerer, surrounded by artistic colleagues in the Globe theatre, where he tested and retested his ideas. And that Tolstoy was raised in a bustling household, full of artistic visitors, where children and adults put on plays, and read stories and poetry - their own and others’ - aloud. All of which sounds very like a workshop to me.
I reject the implication that “real” writers like Tolstoy and Shakespeare (and Scarlett Thomas?) are driven by a godlike, creative facility denied to lesser mortals. All writing - the “good”, the “bad” and the “great” - rises from the same impulse. What fired Tolstoy and Shakespeare and yes, even Scarlett, is what fires the fledgling writer who picks up Mslexia.
Just what is Thomas trying to control? The clue is in the way she mistakenly attributes her own writing preferences (solitary) to the greats. For Scarlett is clever, you see. Her literary novels are packed with ideas — everything from poststructuralism to vegetarianism — and the Mslexia interview is littered with references to the darlings of academia, Derrida and Foucault.
Like many clever people she displays more than a little arrogance, thoughout the interview favouring intellectualism over emotion, and conflating cleverness with creativity — in a way which I imagine the two great humanists, Shakespeare and Tolstoy, would find amusing.
This leads her to dismiss a key creativity tool, in an even more clueless assertion than her anti-workshop diatribe: “Don’t bother with ‘morning pages’,” she says. “All that Dorothea Brande stuff — there is too much emphasis on writing about your childhood or using the most emotionally overwrought crap you can.”
As a great many writers who have reason to be indebted to them know, Morning Pages is the term used by Julia Cameron in her bestselling, The Artist’s Way, to describe the simple technique of writing three pages of whatever thoughts come to your head, freely and without self-consciousness, first thing each day.
At Font, we use the term “F-R-E-E-Writing” to describe the similar method we endorse (see further details on our F-R-E-E-Writing Page at http://www.fontlitagency.com/onaross/free_writing.htm). The emphasis is a little different to Cameron’s; we stress the need to write as fast as possible and take writing students through some other simple instructions around the process (F is for Fast, R is for Raw and E-E is for Exact-but-Easy).
Having had the privilege of working with hundreds of writers who between them have created thousands of amazing poems and stories, I can say that I have yet to see a single one who practiced F-R-E-E-Writing failing to improve and grow — often very dramatically.
It is no coincidence that both Jo Devereux and Izzy Mulcahy, the protagonists of Lovers’ Hollow and A Dance in Time both write their way to a resolution. Their experience is one I have seen replicated again and again and is a tribute to my belief in the power of writing to heal, empower and liberate.
I have seen it benefit writers in many different countries, at every level of economic, social and personal development – from those who have published to critical and commercial success to those with weak literacy skills.
This method forms the core of my own writing practice and my teaching — without the energy, openness and connections it brings about, I feel I would have little to offer writing students beyond technical tips and pointers. I teach the same simple technique, over and over, without ever tiring of it because my respect for F-R-E-E Writing and my understanding of its complex potential, continues to expand and deepen.
Here are ten reasons why we believe that FREE-Writing is a necessary daily practice for all those who want to write well.
1. FREE-Writing liberates. The method operates on the premise that it is not the events that happen to us – as individuals or as writers - that count, so much as our inner relationship to those events. Sometimes, yes, we are overwrought in our F-R-E-E-Writing. Or whiny or irritable or sad or angry or miserable. Or joyful or elated or carefree or blissed out. Over time, all our emotions will find their way in. That is one of the values of FREE-Writing — to show us how transient those emotions are and in doing so, lessen their hold on us. This gives us the distance (objectivity) that is a prerequisite of art.
2. FREE-Writing uncovers. Because we write as fast as possible, thoughts and emotions are allowed to rise without the internal censor kicking in. This brings us to new understandings — concealed meanings and significances are brought to the surface. Virginia Woolf writes eloquently of this in her memoir, “A Sketch of the Past”. She calls them “shocks”, those moments of profound insight that come from examining our past, because of how they force an awareness we wouldn’t otherwise have had.
3. FREE-Writing inspires. Ideas and emotions that are useful to our “real” writing (and our lives and relationships) emerge, seemingly from nowhere.
4. FREE-Writing connects. We connect with ourselves — the inner self, at all levels: mind, emotion and spirit. We connect with the outer world, by increasing our awareness of all our relationships, with people, places and things
5. FREE-Writing stabilises. The best writing uses emotion as material but rises from a space beyond emotion. Given free vent, moods and emotions are siphoned off in our notesbooks and far less likely to interfere with our “real” writing. We become a channel for the deep stuff rather than a mouthpiece for ego thought or emotion.
6. FREE-Writing empowers. It teaches us to trust our own experience of the world, our own intuition – essential to a writer - and gives us confidence that we will be able to express that in words. Truly allowing all the voices inside diminishes the power of any one (the critic).
7. F-R-E-E-Writing heals. Woolf says that, by writing, she did for herself what the then new practice of psychoanalysis was doing for its patients: “I expressed some very long and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it, I explained it and then laid it to rest”.
8. F-R-E-E-Writing unblocks. Regular and committed use of FREE-Writing generates a progressive strengthening of the psyche, leading to new recognitions, ideas and emotions that overcome habitual anxieties or self-sabotage. This is a very different dynamic from attempting to control what we perceive to be our flaws or bad habits (I will definitely write today. I really should be writing now. Why can’t I write? I’m useless, lazy, procrastinating…. bla bla bla…). Consciously disciplining ourselves into change is generally doomed. We manage it for a time but our old, ingrained ways resurface, stronger than ever. (We see this dynamic clearly in binge drinkers or compulsive eaters but it is there to an extent in us all.) With regular FREE-Writing, the shells of our bad habits are sloughed away as new experiences and preferences emerge - without conscious manipulation.
9. F-R-E-E-Writing rights. At a daily level, it improves your psychic state, elevates your mood, makes you feel centred, sets you up for your day. Everybody always feels better after a F-R-E-E-Writing session than before.
10. FREE-Writing contextualises. Over time, we realise that our lives have been going somewhere, however blind we may have been to the direction. We find the connections beneath the surface fractures, the meaning that has been trying to establish itself in us. Re-entering the experiences of our lives allows them to serve as starting points for new, often unpredictable, inner movements that yield profound transformations. All of which, of course, makes its way into our “real” writing.
Freeing the words is the writer’s first task. Nothing helps, supports and guides writers through that task like FREE-Writing.
So don’t let sweeping statements prevent you from accessing a good writing group, or workshop, or coach, if that is what you feel your writing needs. And whether you write in a group or alone, know that F-R-E-E-Writing every day will ensure that you, and your work, both flourish.
Thomas is certainly an interesting writer but, equally certainly, no writing teacher. A line by one of her idols, a line so true it has became a truism still cited four hundred years on, says it all – in writing, Scarlett, as in life: comparisons are odious.
To learn more about FREE-Writing, including how to do it click here
5 Responses to “Why F-R-E-E-Write? by Orna Ross”
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February 22nd, 2008 at 10:26 am
Addendum: on re-reading the interview in Mslexia here at Font Towers (yes, glutton for annoyance!) we were startled to see the following sentence: “Writing has been an escape since childhood for the 35-year-old(Scarlett Thomas) , who lectures in creative writing at the University of Kent at Canterbury”.
So Scarlett “lectures” on creative writing while telling people not to attend writing workshops? What do her students make of this?
February 28th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
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February 29th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
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March 3rd, 2008 at 5:06 am
[…] Ross presents Why F-R-E-E-Write? by Orna Ross posted at WRITING ADVICE & PUBLISHING ADVICE from Font, saying, “Scarlett Thomas tells […]
May 14th, 2008 at 4:02 am
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