Looped freewriting to generate creativity
Sometimes I forget that everyone is not an English teacher. Some people actually don’t spend most of their time trying to squeeze words and ideas from others! And that means there are probably some creative adults, maybe people who want to write, who may not have tried looped freewriting, or at least not lately.
Google “looped freewriting” and possibly the name of its developer writing scholar Peter Elbow, and you’ll find countless descriptions of the process, but basically, here is how it goes:
Write about your topic for 5-15 minutes without editing.
Read what you wrote, underlining key ideas or phrases or even words.
Write about one of your underlined selections for 5-15 minutes.
Repeat as needed or desired.
You can type or write with a pen or pencil, or a stylus. I recommend using a method that is comfortable for you, and experimenting with different tools. My go-to for this technique is a nice pen and unlined paper.
If I really want to change this up, for whatever reason—for me, when my hands are tired or I’m doing something else at the time, or I want to jolt my relationship with language—I record myself and use a speech to text program or something like YouTube, which may create a decent transcript (depending on how well it understands your speech AND details about your language such as technical terms, the prevalence of names and numbers, and so forth). For me, often just trying to talk it through with the idea of recording and doing a looped freewrite gives me a path forward.