If you've a query or comment on writing or FREE-Writing, email me at:info@ornaross.com.
 Orna Ross
FREE-WRITING
As well as writing novels, poetry and nonfiction, I am intensely interested in the power of writing when we use it to communicate with ourselves.
Like Keats, "I am convinced more and more, day by day that fine writing is, next to fine doing, the top thing in the world". But I am also convinced by my experiences in working with individuals and groups that the value of writing extends way beyond the exchange between professional writer and satisfied reader.
Too often in daily life writing is relegated to a utilitarian role but its capacity is so much wider and deeper than that. I see writing is an invaluable - and often underestimated - tool for life.
Its invention ranks with the discovery of fire as a human breakthrough. Writing enables us to store and pass on information, knowledge and wisdom. It has fundamentally changed how humans live together. It literally underwrites the complex cultures we live within and has facilitated the greatest human achievements -- without writing there would be no mathematics, no science, no philosophy, no history, no cinema and, of course, no literature.
Through writing, we experience the miracle of “speaking” to each other across dead generations and vast continents. Equally miraculous, I believe, is the power writing gives us to “speak” to, and understand, ourselves.
My interest in this aspect of writing has led me to a technique we call FREE-Writing.
At Font, all our aspiring and published writers are encouraged to use this method as a foundation for their other, more structured, writing.
FREE=FAST, RAW & EXACT-BUT-EASY
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.
Writing regularly to yourself both keeps you safe and sets you free. I can personally echo the words that Izzy says in A Dance in Time: for me, writing is both the roof on my house and the gap in my fence".
This sense of safety and freedom is the bedrock from which significant creative work can emerge.
FREE stands for Fast, Raw and Exact-But-Easy. Using this method the aim is to write fast enough to get beyond our censoring, conscious minds to access subconscious levels.
It has made such a difference in my own life that it is now my daily practice. I have seen it make such a difference in other lives that I now pass it on whenever I can.
I have introduced on this method to writers, of course, but also to postgraduate students and returners-to-work, to immigrant groups and women recovering from drug addiction. I have witnessed its benefits among people from different countries and at every level of social and personal development, even those with weak literacy skills.
I teach the same simple technique, over and over, without ever tiring of it because my respect for FREE-Writing and my understanding of its complex potential, continues to expand and deepen.
Over the years, I have come to see FREE-Writing not as a luxury for those with the time to do it but a simple, significant shortcut to social and emotional wellbeing. A daily brushing of the psyche, that takes a little bit longer – though not much – than a good brushing and flossing of the teeth.
I have come to believe that everybody who can should be FREE Writing. Especially writers.
FREE-WRITING FOR HEALING
Dozens of studies have found that most people, from schoolchildren to nursing-home residents feel happier and healthier after writing about deeply traumatic memories.
In his book Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, James Pennebaker, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, summarises ten years of scientific research into the connection between writing and increased physical and mental wellbeing. He concludes that writing is a tremendously powerful tool, “far more powerful” than they had predicted when setting up their study.
The effect isn't just emotional. One study found that those who wrote in this way had more active T-lymphocyte cells, an indication of improved immune system.
Other studies have found that they tend to take fewer trips to the doctor, function better in day-to-day tasks, and score higher on tests of psychological well-being once they do regular writing exercises.
The benefits occur regardless of literacy or educational level: all that is needed is a sufficient level of literacy to communicate with oneself. And the more often people write, the more beneficial the effects.
As a result of such findings, Writing Therapy is now used to help people with all kinds of physical and emotional problems, including life-threatening illnesses such as cancer; chronic conditions such as asthma and rheumatoid arthritis; drug and alcohol addictions; eating disorders; and trauma. It has also been shown to be beneficial for combating low self-esteem, depression, and stress-related ailments and, more surprisingly perhaps, to have a positive impact on heart health: heart rate and blood pressure.
In addition, writing therapy is ideal in helping people cope with grief and loss. For example, poetry therapists were asked to work with the students of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, after the shooting tragedy there in 1999.
FREE-WRITING FOR WRITERS
But FREE-Writing isn't just for those in need of healing. Here are ten reasons why we believe that FREE-Writing is a necessary daily practice for all those who want to write well.
- 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.
- 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.
- FREE-Writing inspires. Ideas and emotions that are useful to our "real" writing (and our lives and relationships) emerge, seemingly from nowhere.
- 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
- 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.
- 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).
- 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”.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 us through that task like FREE-Writing.
HOW TO FREE-WRITE
The method could not be simpler. Its basic requirement is that you write as fast as you can, either randomly or on a specific topic. You write the first thoughts that come to your head.
Whether you are writing randomly or on a given exercise, by writing too fast to think, you leave yourself open. You allow the words to rise spontaneously within you, to come and place themselves on the page without interference.
FREE stands for Fast, Raw and Exact-but-Easy. FREE-Writing does not aim to be linear or logical, it does not aim for anything other than to be done. Each FREE-Writing session is a new journey without a map, in which you just write whatever it is you have to say at that moment in time.
When we allow words to be written in this way, they have tremendous energy. They embrace your whole self and your whole life in the moment of writing. They recognise that you, your self and your life, changes from moment to moment, that the next time you write, you-in-your-life will be different.
F = Fast
You write as fast as you can while remaining legible. Keep your hand moving: once you begin writing, you don’t stop until you have completed the time or page space you have allocated to the exercise. You don’t pause to reread what you’ve just written, because that leads to stalling and attempting to control or refine your first thoughts.
At first your wrist or hand may be sore but don’t worry about that – just keep going. Your muscles will adjust in a few days. Write as fast as you can until you have completed the allocated time or pages.
Let the words flow f-r-e-e. Lose control.
R = Raw
Writing raw has two meanings. On one hand, because you are writing as fast as you can with the aim of unleashing your unconscious mind, you can forget all about spelling, punctuation etc. This writing is for you; when you read it back you will know what you mean: so forget everything your English teachers ever told you and write as raw as you like. Pay no attention to style or expression, just write the thoughts that arise in your own, everyday language.
Don’t cross out or correct or try to edit anything, either as you write or once it is written. Even if you write something you didn’t mean to write, leave it stand.
The second meaning of writing raw is to resist any urge to self-censor. From time to time, you will find thoughts rise in you that you don’t want to write, thoughts that feel frightening or silly or disgusting or pathetic. Thoughts you don’t want anybody else to know you ever had. Let them come, raw as they are. Get them out of you. The words you least feel like writing are often those that are most significant. Don’t think, just write.
“First thoughts have tremendous energy,” says Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down The Bones. “It is the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we generally live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thoughts, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first, fresh flash... First thoughts are also unencumbered by ego, by that mechanism in us that tries to be in control, tries to prove the world is permanent and solid, enduring and logical. The world is not permanent, is ever changing and full of human suffering. So if you express something egoless, it is also full of energy because it is expressing the truth of the way things are.”
Those beginning FREE-Writing are sometimes confronted with great emotions and energy that feels overwhelming. The temptation at that point can be to stop writing, to throw down the pen, to get up from the notebook and walk away. By writing on despite the tears or confusions, by refusing to be thrown off by emotion, we go through to the truth.
Let the words flow f-r-e-e. Lose control.
E-E = Exact-but-easy
What we mean by “exact” is that you should be precise about detail as you write. Not “some fruit” but “a bunch of green grapes”. Not “a man” but “a 35-year-old bricklayer”; not “She sat at her desk, looking sad,” but “She leaned over her desk, the book she had stopped reading discarded, her arms crossed, her head low.” Take the time and the extra few words it takes to be specific.
This is also a matter of using the original detail of your own life. Nothing links us to our own lives better than writing down the real and precise details of how things actually are for us: the sights and smells, the tastes and feelings. Everyone’s life is at once both ordinary and extraordinary, trivial and important. The trivial detail is always worthy of record: through it, somehow, we sense our own significance.
The challenge is to keep the writing exact-but-easy, specific and precise without stopping to chew our pen over details or slowing down. This sounds contradictory but in fact is much easier in practice than it sounds. Once you give yourself the instruction in advance of your writing session, you find it happens automatically. Don’t chastise yourself as you write for getting it “wrong”: if you write something vague like “flower” and notice it, just put the name of the flower – “a rose” - beside “flower”. Be gentle with yourself.
And if you do find yourself in a situation where you have to choose between speed or detail, choose speed: writing fast is the first requirement of FREE-Writing. Take a moment, before you begin a session each time, to instruct yourself to write concrete and specific details. We all have the habit of thinking and writing in abstractions, but lived detail is what we’re after in our FREE-Writing.
Let the words flow f-r-e-e. Lose control.
FIRST FREE-WRITING SESSION
Now let’s try the method. Wherever you are reading this, stop. Go and get yourself a pen and an A4 size (21 X 29.7cm) notebook. (Small notebooks can lead to small thoughts!).
Sit then, in stillness and quiet, with your pen and notebook before you. For the first two minutes, sit with silence, letting your breathing become progressively slower and deeper. Let your thoughts rest, waiting to begin this new activity.
At the end of the two minutes, take up your pen and begin to write. Whatever form the words take, let them arrive without your direction. Do not reject or censor anything. Neither is there any need to affirm anything you write. Just let it come, without judgement. Do not welcome any thought or image because it is optimistic, or encouraging or “positive” in any way. Similarly, no thought or image should be rejected because it is too “negative” or because it points toward difficulties that may lie ahead. Accept what comes.
Please do not content yourself with thinking about what you would write if you did the exercises. Thinking about the content of what you would write is vastly different from actually writing it, particularly from FREE-Writing it. To get the benefits of this book, you must do the writing.
So please do not proceed until you have done three pages of FREE-Writing
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That’s it. You’ve done your first FREE-Writing session. How did it feel? Were you surprised by anything that emerged? Did it feel strange?
If you wish, take a few moments to record your responses. Did you manage to burn through to first thoughts, to where the mind feels and sees, rather than thinks? Perhaps not. Often it takes a few sessions before we feel fully comfortable with the method and some of us (especially those who had good English teachers in school) may find it difficult to let go on the page. We learned too well how to censor ourselves, how to tidy things up so they were nice and neat (and unoriginal and boring).
Try not to judge your writing as good or bad. In FREE-Writing terms, writing that is “good” is simply writing that is honest and open but we don’t – can’t – always produce such words. Sometimes we can write what seems like garbage for days and, then, like a flower from compost, something significant emerges.
But we don’t work for that. We work only to do it. We know that process of doing it is what counts. So if you are in any way unhappy with what you produced today, in your first FREE-Writing session, forget about it. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you did it.
And that you will FREE-Write again tomorrow.
If you've a query or a comment on writing or FREE-Writing, email me at info@ornaross.com |
