Hello, and welcome to tips and prompts to begin the writing process cut through writer's block created daily practice and achieve your writing goals. Welcome to the first major lecture in the course free writing. This lecture covers techniques that can help you with course design course organization course planning, help you to cut through writer's block, created daily practice and achieve your writing goals. free writing technique is our first major technique, and it is listed in the section for different types of brainstorming. And free writing is basically the foundation for all the other kinds of free writing and generating ideas in brainstorming and it's also a good foundation for all other kinds of writing. It's a good foundation fundamentally in terms of helping you to generate ideas and basically free writing involves from Writing whatever comes to mind stream of conscious without stopping for a given period of time, ideas come to the surface easily.
And this can be a good backdoor approach to finding ideas and getting past writer's block with this unguarded method. So basically, free writing, if it helps you to picture it this way stream of conscious is basically well Merriam Webster dictionary defines stream of conscious as the continuous unedited chronological flow of conscious experience through the mind. And that's exactly what free writing is. So if it's helpful to picture that current through your hand, if you start in your head and you picture that current coming down your arm into your hand, whether you're typing or writing, you can do free writing on the computer as well. Writing is optimal, but picture that current coming through your hand and down onto the page. And that's a good way to help you to create that steady.
Flow, that unneeded chronological flow of conscious experience through the mind. And that's basically what free riding is. It's to sit down and write what comes to mind as it comes to your mind. It's that simple. Most riders will use free riding when they do their major composing and rough drafting of any kind of prose piece. But the inner critic and writer's block want to stop the process.
Free writing is a way to get past the inner critic and get ideas out. So it's a combination, you learn to control your mind. It's a meditative process almost, in that you kind of go into the zone and you forget about everything else. And you're just focused on that exclusively. You're not worried about perfectionism. You're not worried about mistakes.
You're not worried about anything like that. And it's a great backdoor approach for perfectionist like me. I'm a terrible perfectionist. And so this technique works really well. If you have trouble with writer's block because you expect everything to be perfect in the first sitting. If you're like that this is a great way to get past the inner critic and get ideas out.
And so in the sense that you are able to get ideas out, it is a free process, but then there's also a certain level of control to it. And so situations for free riding, free riding is good for a wide range of riding situations, possibly the widest range of any of these techniques. Now, this one is best for beating writer's block for beating perfectionism and for beating the internal critic, when you write steady, and a pretty good speed and your writing stream of conscious, your critic doesn't have time to catch up with your hand because that flow is going out of you. And it's a natural flow, and you learn how to just practice it. And it just gets better over time. And so it helps you to get past perfectionism.
And it. Like I said, For me, it's been one of the most key practice in helping me to get ideas out for stories, for essays for pieces of creative nonfiction, it's also great to help you if you're working on a course. And so it's a great place to start. When you're working on free writing, you don't want to worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar, it's just your idea to get ideas out. So don't beat yourself up. If they're not perfect.
The process is messy. So accept that that's part of the process as well. And that's okay. Okay. And so those are some things to think about as you go through the free writing process and learn to do it. So, when you're looking for a topic to explore what you know about a topic, that's one time that it's good to do free writing.
Free writing is also a good technique to get you started and help you get ideas. And like I said, even when you're building courses, if you're not sure where to start, and you need to get ideas on a specific lecture, or on your overall course concept, just sitting down in free writing will get you To ideas and then maybe something with a lot of energy or a lot of potential comes out and then webs out from there and so it starts off in one place and then it goes somewhere else and that's okay. So go with that flow go with that energy, so to speak, it's logical, but it's also a very intuitive process. So situations for free riding, free riding is also used at the beginning, middle and end of a piece when writer's block sets in, and it helps you get out of a rut and get those juices flowing again.
It can also be helpful when you need to step back from a piece and get clarity on it. Now other situations for free writing, free writing can be very helpful if you journal or are in a stressful situation and need to vent and it can be a great release event. You might want to destroy the piece when you're done so others don't see it. A little bit about that some people have a spiritual practice, some people don't. Some people may journal as just a form of mental health and Personal Growth and experience. And so free writing is a great technique to use, especially the rules of writing practice, if you journal, if you're ever having a stressful situation at work or in a personal situation, it can be really great just to write stream of conscious, write like crazy, and just get all that stuff out.
It doesn't necessarily mean anything. And it is good to destroy it when you're done or somebody doesn't find it. Because a lot of times, you don't even mean a lot of the stuff that you're saying. It's just a good way to get your mind clear. Okay, so how do we do free writing, Natalie Goldberg, and she is an amazing writer and writing teacher, she created what's called the rules of writing practice. Now, those are probably the most important thing that you'll learn in this entire course.
And they're the foundation for a lot of these other techniques, but these are the best instruction that I've seen for free writing. Please consider googling these for more detail, or I also encourage you to get one of Natalie's books either writing down the bones or why Mind writing down the bones or Wildmon. Both are excellent books if you're into creative writing, creating a daily practice and just learning how to enjoy writing in general.