A nice writing strategy
About a month ago I downloaded NetNewsWire, started reading a lot of blogs and felt the need to start writing.
I had blogs before but I believe I’ve never written a personal blog with my personal thoughts and all.
So I set out to practice in my journal app, because it’s already set up for me (metadata, sync, etc) and it counts how many words I use. Not that the number of words matter, but I’ve read about 750 Words and sounded like a nice number to aim to.
Every day now, I make a cup of coffee, set a 15 min timer and start pouring whatever I’m thinking into my journal app, without editiing or even looking at my screen. I call it “brain dump” (which I probably read somewhere as well). Most days I end up with a 1200ish word entry and a nice feeling like things are more clear.
One day, I went through a rabbit hole from an xTweet, to Freewrite’s website, to downloading the app, to reading the onboarding default page text, to learning that:
Freewriting is a writing strategy developed in 1973 — it’s where you write continuously for a set time without worrying about grammar, spelling, or anything like that. A pure stream of consciousness.
So it appears I was using this technique without knowing it was a strategy and I was gladly surprised not only for finding out it was validated but also for knowing it had been working really well for me.
I’ve used this freewriting strategy for this post. What you’re reading is the edited version. The original version has 1300ish words and a lot of other insights and deviations that are valuable enough to become other notes or blogposts.
Do you have any strategies or techniques for writing? I’d love to hear about them.
Thank you for reading.