Thursday, October 2, 2008
Sometimes you can not write anymore, especially when you have to write something like an essay for your English exam. You don't like your text, you feel anxious and frustrated, you are stuck. Peter Elbow in his book “Writing Without Teachers” introduces a method to overcome the so called writer's block. As a main tool to fight the anxiety he introduces freewriting. Freewriting is a process of writing for a certain amount of time non-stop. You can write something on a specific topic or just write down all the thoughts that come to your mind. When you freewrite, you don't judge your text, you don't delete or correct anything either, regardless of the mistakes and the stupidity. Freewriting is claimed to help to develop and to grow the ideas for the text, an activity being similar to brainstorming. Peter Elbow claims that a chain of associations that can produce precious ideas and words is often stopped by critical thinking. Freewriting allows all of your ideas and thoughts to grow regardless of how stupid they are. I believe it helps a lot to overcome the anxiety while writing, since you let everything that is in your mind go to the paper, you don't block anything.
It appears that sometimes critical thinking is a hindrance not only in writing, but also in drawing. Bert Dodson in his book “Keys to Drawing” describes two types of inner dialog when drawing: the critical dialog and the practical dialog. Critical dialog includes judging your drawing in the process. For instance: “That arm doesn't look right” or “I never draw the legs right”. This kind of thinking often stops from finishing the drawing and causes impatience, anxiety and confusion. Another, practical way of thinking includes practical thoughts like “What does that shape look like?”, “How bumpy is that contour?”. Practical dialog is all about observation of the object that is being drawn.
I found the concepts of freewriting and practical dialog in drawing somewhat similar. They are similar in the way they make you stop the self-involved process of criticizing what you do. I wonder what could be the other fields where one could use the method of free-doing to expand and explore the ideas. Jazz improvisations could probably be called free-playing. What is free-speaking then? The process of free speaking in a group of people could eventually bring out many interesting and smart ideas. If one starts speaking only smart things the process of associations is crippled and many wonderful ideas are left behind. What about free-coding? Probably it is something similar to agile approach, where you explore the ideas by constant refactoring.
4 comments:
Sometimes the anxiety about the imperfect product can be relaxed with for example alcohol. But then one will have to fight with oneself to return to writing, which rarely comes to ones mind after having a beer or so.
In general I would advice to apply this even in communication between people. I bet everyone has been in a situation when you don't know what to say and things remain unsaid. Unfortunately unsaid things usually grow bigger, sometimes even to such a size they cannot come out of the mouth. It is then too late. So better just try telling. Or even writing a free-letter would help. It is a pity the culture of letters is not practiced by people anymore.
Before the unsaid words would go into paper and be delivered in an envelope. I doubt email can replace it, at least it looks cheap to write an email with important thoughts.
Things becoming too big to go out of mouth - a very nice metaphor. Things that grow should be spitted - there is no other way. Or the other way is to explode, but this way is very dirty.
I agree about letters, it's so pleasant to get a sincere letter from someone. I think I got one many years ago. Email is also alright, it's just that it does not smell and you can't see the handwriting.
there are a lot of good ideas you say, however i guess as far it concerns free-speaking it also involves a lot of trust, especially in an environment where everyone tries to sound clever or otherwise shuts up and keeps the own unfinished thoughts a mystery.
i guess it is easier with a letter, because you write down some things, seal the envelope and send it away. compared with email it has the big advantage that you do not have the chance to re-read it and call yourself an idiot for writing this and that, nor can you simply send a recall and ask the person to ignore it, so basically this slow communication stops from obsessing about things too much. (also you can stop to feel paranoic about someone just copy-pasting parts of your confidential conversation to someone else ;)
maybe you will never know if the person ever recieved it.. even in that case i think a letter was not in vain, because at least one was 'spitting out' all the things and often it does not really matter too much if the other one read it or will reply - even though sometimes it would be very welcomed.
(btw - this was free-writing so i refuse to be held accountable for the content ;)
Free doing seems to be the supportive method for boosting own creativity (I do not agree about alcohol effect. Yes, indeed, it helps to fight anxiety just at a very particular moment of time, however, hardly it will make you even a bit more creative... in contrast to drugs?)
Improvisation, probably as well as free coding, should be serving for exactly the same purpose.
However, this method fells short to be applicable to any kind of social groups rather than individuals alone. Therefore free speech resembles somewhat a simple bullshitting around than a creative process :) ... Ideas are conceived by individuals and not by entire social groups, nevertheless, individual must feel free in a social group to be able to generate ideas. Where, in fact, free speach might be helpful in establishing and strengthening the degree of feeling free of one with regard to the social group.
Another interesting variant of free-doing techniques might be the free-moving/free-dancing technique :) again liberating the individual from constrained movements and boosting the creative process of finding new movements never done by one before. Just to imagine, it might also be practiced by entire social group (team building) :D again for the purpose of strengthening relationships between individuals in a social group, liberating them from constraints between each other, endorsing the trust, which are vitally important qualities for the social group's creative performance altogether.
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