Why Try Freewriting?

Unexpected benefits come from this practice

Can you imagine writing 10,000 articles? That’s exactly what Henry Hazlitt did. He was a 20th-century intellectual who, by his seventieth birthday, had published over 10,000 editorials, articles, and columns. His works, including his widely acclaimed book Economics in One Lesson, have educated and positively impacted millions.

What was his secret? Did he have a genius IQ? Was he actually a pen name that multiple authors produced works under? No. There is one thing that Henry Hazlitt did to produce his enormous corpus: he wrote every day from the time he was twenty years old.

That’s it—he wrote daily for fifty years. Sometimes we think there’s something innately special about a person that makes them so prodigious. But at the end of the day, it’s a person’s ability to show up rain or shine that produces their “superhuman” level of output. 

How do we show up every day to write and produce noteworthy ideas as Hazlitt did? One way is to freewrite.

Freewriting is writing with speed and without inhibition. It’s writing with vulnerability, frankness, and gutsiness and without slowing down, self-censoring, evaluating, focusing on grammatical accuracy, or even examining the truth of what you’re saying. Freewriting, in its purest form, is putting on paper whatever comes to mind about your subject of interest.

My favorite form of freewriting is to find an emotion I have about something and then use it to energize my writing. Choose any emotion—fear, anger, sadness, peace, love, happiness—and then write about why you have that emotion and about what. I find that writing from a negative emotion is the easiest because that’s usually when we’re most apt to yell or cry out what we want to say. When we’re in a happy, even-keel state there’s no emotional imperative to drive our writing.

Another form of freewriting is to choose an idea you like from any source—a book, a movie, a person, your brain, etc.—and then use a fill-in-the-blank sentence to get your mind rolling. I like to use a sentence like this: “This idea reminds me of ___ because ___. And this may be important to me because ___.” After choosing an idea to focus on, I notice that my mind fills in the blanks automatically with numerous possible answers. For example, if I focus on “the law of supply and demand” I may write something like:

The law of supply and demand reminds me of war because wars seem to start over the scarcity of some in-demand resource (e.g. land, oil, food, etc.). This may be important to me because in-demand, dwindling resources could serve as an indicator of the chances of a war occurring.

This second freewriting method is useful for a few reasons. One, you can treat this idea as a working hypothesis and then look out at reality and ask, “Is this true?” If there is some truth to it, then you can refine this idea into something useful. It also helps you connect otherwise “dissimilar” ideas and tease out the concrete implications of broader ideas. Third, filling in the blanks gives you a peek at what your mind immediately thinks so that you can understand yourself better. If you never capture the ideas your mind is actually coming up with—because you’re always “self-editing” or “thinking before you speak”—then you won’t understand the automatic workings of your mind as well. By freewriting, you can capture your thought process and identify your thinking patterns. You can use this for self-improvement purposes.

Freewriting also helps you grow a repository of ideas that you can draw from for inspiration or material whenever you want to produce an article, script, book, etc. As Hazlitt writes in Thinking as a Science: “What printing has done for humanity in preserving the knowledge of the ages, writing will do for the individual in preserving his own reflections.”

Freewriting may be frustrating at first because it demands vulnerability with your thoughts. When I started freewriting I found it difficult to write down what I actually thought out of fear someone might see my mind naked. But, all I had was an imaginary audience staring at my work over my shoulder. Once I realized it was just me holding myself back, freewriting became something I craved doing.

Once you get used to freewriting, it becomes a refreshing and fun process. It’s a place to vent your emotions but also a playground for your ideas. Once you get over the possible hump of writing vulnerably, you’ll find it a delight to write every day, as Henry Hazlitt did.