Freewriting relief?

Hi,

A simple point, yet want to make it nonetheless... does anyone else find BTS/ATS/PTS a good forum to freewrite thoughts on a certain topic/interest and either post or, even delete a long response/thread idea after thought over?

I find myself doing the latter sometimes, yet recently felt relief from at least seeing my thoughts/research ideas written out.

Here's a link to "freewriting" for those interested, the Wiki page mentions "practice" and that's how I heard of the practice, in a college English class and I haven't thought about it until joining this board:

en.wikipedia.org...

Freewriting was advanced in Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers (1975), and has been popularised by Julia Cameron through her book, The Artist's Way (1992).

Natalie Goldberg combined the notion of freewriting with principles of Zen Buddhist meditation and developed "writing practice", described in books such as Writing Down the Bones (1986). Writing practice is different from freewriting encouraged in undergraduate and creative writing programs: writing practice encourages the writer to be aware of his or her thoughts throughout the writing practice, and may be an ends unto itself, rather than a means to produce a more polished piece later.

[edit on 16-11-2007 by anhinga]

Of course it is! That's what the rant forum seems to be filled with. There are some good rants in that there forum

And picking a subject to rant about seems to be a good way to get the creative juices flowing for some.

Welcome to BTS, anhinga

reply to post by Beachcoma


Thanks Beachcoma!

This is such a great site to visit daily, there's few others I'll spend this amount of time on/in -- so much information to digest and learn about. . .

. . .SMI!

[edit on 16-11-2007 by anhinga]

Yeah the whole place is great, but....

BTS rocks! People in ATS can be mean.
It's like everyone is out to get everyone. I'm finding myself spending more time on BTS because of that. It's much more relaxed here, the atmosphere. The group is more tightly-knit

reply to post by anhinga


Best way I've found to write is to just put one word behind the other. Minimal planning, is the key. Or something like that...

reply to post by seagull


But that's exactly what free-writing is about -- minimal planning, no framework to start with, just words following the words preceding it.

reply to post by Beachcoma



Was I stating the obvious again? Sorry, I'll try to do better...

It's what usually works for me. The more I plan, the more my writing comes across as almost robotic.

reply to post by seagull


Seagull! a fellow birder?! I love the black headed and Bonaparte's gulls and try to see as many as them as possible.

For me, without planning, there will be many errors, I can't focus on complete thoughts within topics. I like to use the 'preview post' function should it be something long w/ links. Even then, I often find spelling errors!

Originally posted by anhinga
Even then, I often find spelling errors!

You can take advantage of a spellcheck toolbar for that problem. Are you using IE of FireFox? If it's IE then you can the GoogleToolbar. If it's FireFox, then the latest versions support a built-in dictionary function.

A word of warning -- using the spellcheck toolbars kind of makes you a little slower at spelling if you're too used to it

Thanks for the information OP.

I have no problem verbly getting my thoughts out and understood. But when I begin to write it's like I become shy and am so very careful to not make mistakes.

I shall try the freewriting and see what happens.