The major benefit I have noticed in producing this freewriting blog is that I want to write more often. This is now my third post of the day, and I am not struggling to find motivation. I have some free time, and so I am drawn to writing. The 500 word goal feels eminently doable - not too long, but just long enough to feel satisfying. Usually I am able to keep writing until I’m done, though just now I feel a bit distracted.

I was just re-reading part of The Craft of Writing with regard to drafting. The authors recommend freewriting a first draft with the assumption that most of the text will not survive in that state. I have found that when I freewrite sections of my academic writing, most of the freewritten text makes it into the final draft. The authors of The Craft of Writing seem to suggest that multiple revisions is the way to go for substantive writing. I agree, and yet a good deal of my dissertation is really just second draft text.

That being said, I do not wish to repeat the experience I had writing my diss. Don’t get me wrong, I loved most of the process, but at the time I was still writing in a slow, sentence-by-sentence fashion, eking out my words like a dentist pulling teeth. Freewriting, on the other hand, feels much more natural. In fact, one of the issues I have with writing is that I can’t possibly write as quickly as I can speak. When I speak the words come right out. Writing - whether it is typing or writing by hand - is a naturally slower process. I wish I could simply forget about the rules of grammar and syntax as I write, as that would make things faster. This freewriting blog, though, has greatly improved the flow of my writing.

This blog has also re-introduced me to the idea of writing for the sake of writing. Writing, for me, has long been a utilitarian skill: something to use for academic work, and not much more. Writing for the sake of writing is more about having fun and exploring some ideas. Even now, I should go back and revise the last sentence - I don’t like it - but I won’t. Freewriting is about moving forward no matter what; it’s about getting the words down.

I really should be writing this blog using MS Word. If I plan to re-write any of it in the future I will need to have it in some sort of printable form. Atom doesn’t have a print function. I like Atom’s simplicity, but it is built for coding, not writing. In the end, I am a writer in the making rather than a diehard code geek. I do need to use Atom to create the Markdown files for the blog, but I could easily copy-and-paste from Word files. As it is, if I want to revise any of the blog text I have written so far I will need to copy the text, file by file, into Word.

Maybe one of my goals with this blog should be to produce first draft text for a book-length project. That would require a little bit of planning, but, as I am finding, producing the raw text is just a matter of pumping out a little at a time. The trick is going to be finding a subject worth writing about. And yet again, that subject may already be there in what I have written so far. I know it’s a cliche, but if writing is about finding out what I think, I may already have stumbled upon an idea worth writing about. Time to begin re-reading the blog posts to see if there is a nugget or two in there, breaking from my practice of writing and moving on.

Time to start milking this process.