This is a shortie. Relief! I hear you say. It has been a funny week, and so you get something (your Pride-focused exploratory writing challenge), but I’m not going to give you a preamble of any kind. (The full Seven Deadly Sins Pride post is here if you missed it.)

But I will give you, if you participate, a chance to win something money can’t buy. It has taken me an entire year, but I have finally started unpacking the boxes I brought back from my London office last September after losing my job, and I have too many books (of course I do).

Some of those books cannot legally be sold, so I will give them away: uncorrected proof copies of my second novel, Devotion, which was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award. I am just about to start adapting it (speculatively, I might add) for TV. I have quite a few, and for my archive, I only need one. I’m told that uncorrected proofs are a popular collectable among bibliophiles.

Right n…

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This one is easy. I mean, who doesn’t like a rant! Okay, many people don’t actually like a rant; I can think of my dear Nanna (dad’s mum), the sweetest of all humans, who I never saw angry in my life (and I don’t think Dad did either). And what did she die of? Cancer. It was quite a revelation to me when I started learning, 18 years ago now, about the links between particular emotional states and physical illnesses. I remember reading a piece by Emma Roberts, a London-based EFT practitioner who specialises in working with cancer patients, who said, “I have never met a cancer patient who isn’t angry”. And she meant by that, hidden anger.

And I thought of my grandmother, who put up with so much shit (for decades) from her shell-shocked husband, who was never the same after coming back from The Somme. Not a shred of anger anywhere to see.

And I thought of my brother, who died of a rare bone cancer aged 17, who expressed his anger not only through witty remarks…

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This is Week 2 of our mid-summer Writing Challenge on the Seven Deadly Sins. For Week 1, scroll to the bottom of this post about Lust. Find earlier Writing Challenges here.

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Creating a Finished Piece of Writing

We’re in the penultimate week of the Writing Home Challenge. If you’re still with me, hooray! And if you’ve not been keeping up (see snails above), that’s okay.

1. Everyone goes at their own pace. There is no “right” pace.

2. Also, life gets in the way sometimes.

These writing challenge posts will still be here for you when you have a moment. They are at this tab on the How to Evolve website: https://www.howtoevolve.me/s/writing-challenges .

This week, I want to talk about creating a finished piece of writing: how to get there and what that means. If you’ve already finished a piece of writing to your satisfaction during this challenge, that’s great. But if not, I hope this post might inspire you to do that. And if you have, maybe this post will give you the impetus to look at it one last time, just to make sure it’s everything you want it to be.

I’m going to have an imaginary conversation with you now and pretend I know w…

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Home, of course, isn’t really about houses at all. Despite my interest in “home” as a located place (indeed, places) the real essence of home is a feeling.

What words would you connect with feeling home? For me I would say safe is the primary one and belonging the secondary one. Without these two feelings, a place won’t feel like home even if I call it that name for convenience and live there for years (as with the place I lived from 8 to 18). And you might feel a sense of both safety and belonging somewhere temporary — I had that experience at my first Green Gathering, for example — but it would be odd to call it home if it was only your base for a few days. So, semi-permanence is probably the third quality I would add. Please feel free to add your own feeling words that qualify a place as “home” in the comments! I’m not going to claim universality, and you’re of the nomadic sort, you might skip the last one and have others.

I’m in the proces…

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Fictional houses

A “house” dream. A big old barn conversion. I was changing the arrangement of the lower floors ... The upstairs was much as it has always been and I was on my way through to that perfect room perched high up over everything to see if I could make the access easier. Squeezing myself through a tiny doorframe on the way, I thought “enlarge that for a start.” I noticed some damage to the roof. It didn’t seem to be letting rain into the house (it was over an “open” part of the building) but I needed to check …

(Dream diary extract, 25th January 2010)

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We write memoir for many reasons. Maybe we have a story to tell. Maybe we want to get our lives recorded to leave something for our family. Maybe we have literary ambitions. Or we may simply want to explore what it is to be us.

At the beginning of the Writing Home Challenge, I asked for your reasons for taking part, and about a third of you said gaining insights/healing past wounds was your primary reason. But even those who were looking to improve their writing skills are likely to find that writing memoir brings them new insights and some measure of healing.

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After a week’s breather, here we are: launching the second six weeks of the Writing Home Challenge. As you can see from this week’s piece, I’ve been doing my homework (yeah, I know). Here’s how I approached writing it, and some ideas for developing your own pieces from the freewriting you’ve done. Even if you already have something you’re happy with, you might find a way of reapproaching it that pleases you even more. So let’s get cracking.

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Where we are

We are in Week 6 of the Writing Home challenge, and if you’ve been taking part, you should have some freewriting and other notes generated by the exercises in weeks 1-4. In Week 5 we had our EFT tapping session, which is both for those who are writing memoir for healing purposes, and for those who would like to clear some of the emotions that come up when we write about foundational and sometimes painful things.

Tapping brings great clarity. Friday’s piece about my brother, for example, came directly out of an insight I had while tapping, and I continued to tap (just on my collarbone point as I wrote it (or more accurately, as I was reading aloud what I had written so far, to find the glitches in it; as a touch-typist, I need both hands for the actual writing part!)

But maybe you skipped the tapping (and that’s okay too! Nothing is for everyone :-)). Maybe you just had a week off, or had a week to catch up on some of the writing exercises from th…

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How do we grow? First, we suffer.

We are born these bright, brilliant, curious beings, full of love and wonder, and from almost the first moment, we get bashed about by life. Hopefully, not literally, although yes, babies get battered. Many of those don’t survive, or survive with profound damage.

But even very loving, well-meaning parents can hurt our little baby hearts. They leave us to cry to “sleep train” us, implanting a fear of abandonment. They leave us hungry to train us into their routines. Sometimes, they drop us. Sometimes, they forget us. As we get older and sleep less, they might get stressed and shout at us. There seems to be no way around it. In the words of Philip Larkin,

They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad,
They may not mean to, but they do

My husband and I thought we were doing a stand-out job with my fourth child, our daughter. We raised her by the continuum concept. I breastfed her on demand until long past her baby teeth, long past when she had the words to ask for it. We practised co-sleeping until she was six. She never cried as a baby, and people constantly commented on this; on how contented she was. We were looking forward to meeting the first non-fucked-up adult human we knew.

But we fucked up. Of course, we did. We were so invested in her being this “super happy child” (our badge of great parenting, give us a medal!) that we dealt poorly with the sudden onset of tantrums aged eight, as her epilepsy medication propelled her into an early puberty (and let’s not look, for now, at the underlying causes of her epilepsy!). Plus, we sent her to school for a couple of years, and you can be sure if the parents are properly messing up a child, school will do it for you; the fucked up teachers, the fucked up other kids.

As my husband said to me when we found out she was self-harming in her teens, “I feel like we made this beautiful sandcastle, and then we put it outside, and the world stamped on it.”

So the point is, we can’t get away with not suffering. And I’ve come to believe that it is actually important that we suffer because it is part of our developmental process. The more we suffer, the more potential we have to grow in profound ways as human beings. Look at those inspirational people who have gone through enormous hardships and now inspire others to overcome perceived limitations. Look, for example, at Nick Vujicic.

I say, potential for growth because, of course, we can get stuck in our suffering. I was stuck in mine for decades (ages 9 to 36). But when we find the will and put in the time to start healing it, that growth begins. Post-traumatic growth is a well-known phenomenon.

But as I’ve written before, trauma isn’t just the big stuff. The small ‘t’ traumas shape us profoundly, all through our childhoods and beyond. The slaps and the put-downs. The insults and injustices. And it is this — small ‘t’ trauma (rather than diving into the stuff that scares us the most) — where we are going today.

Polling Your Thoughts

Last week’s poll asked you to tell me how many childhood homes you had. The snapshot (at 57 replies) surprised me: exactly a third of you (33%) said four or more. That “constantly moving” percentage definitely got me thinking. Me, I had two in the UK and two temporary ones in the US (my Dad’s sabbatical year at Berkeley), but I don’t think the number would matter so much if that second UK home hadn’t not felt like my home at all (it was very much my stepfather’s domain, and we four kids from the first marriage didn’t feel very welcome there).

For this week’s poll, I am asking something a little more personal, something in response to one of last week’s comments: how scared you are of writing parts of your past? I want to focus on this in our optional EFT tapping session next week, and I think it’s useful to start feeling our way into the dark corners — while not scaring ourselves too much.

Humans are understandably and appropriately self-protective beasts, and if this starts looking scary, I know you might run away, and I don’t want that. So there will be no pushing or forcing here. Just a gentle exploration, beginning with bringing to light your awareness of fear around writing your past. And then, if you like, you can join me in some EFT tapping next week in a live Zoom session, so we can bring that fear level down to the point that you might feel safer on that issue, maybe opening up the possibility to write about it and start healing some hard-to-reach areas.

I used to run a weekend course called Write the Damn Book, where we did exactly this, pinpointing what was getting in the way of our writing and removing the barriers via EFT. Next week, in a one-hour live session on Zoom, I’ll show you how to do this whenever you come up against a wall in your writing.

I’d love to work with you on real-life issues, so if you’d like to attend and be one of the people I work with, let me know: send me a private message (email is best), and we can talk through what’s involved. I’ll be recording it for anyone who can’t attend live.

The link to register for the call is at the end of this post.

But first, let’s get a sense (for you as much as for me) of where your fear (if any) might lie by answering this poll:

Structure going forward

As you know, I am experimenting in this Challenge with the best way to be responsive to your needs. My plan from the outset was that our 12 weeks would fall into two halves, with each of those halves comprising four weeks of prompts, followed by two weeks of reflection and writing development. This is week four, so we are about to head into the development fortnight, where posts (still on Tuesdays) will be paid subscribers only, for privacy reasons, with no extra content for free subscribers.

But for the second six weeks, I’m going to try something a little different. In an effort to stop sending so much into your inbox (I know we all need less of that), I am going to combine the second six weeks with my Friday posts.

The first half of each Friday post will be a short personal essay on the theme of the Writing Home challenge: an example of something crafted from the prompts, and this will be free for all to read. The second half of each Friday post will be paywalled and purely for members of the Writing Home challenge, with prompts and exercises to help you make the most out of this life-writing adventure.

So, expect two more Tuesday posts (one, the live Zoom next week), and then we will move the whole caboodle onto Fridays. Hopefully, this will be a pleasing structure for all of us.

Now, let’s dive in!

[This part is just for the paid community for privacy reasons, and because these gorgeous people help pay my mortgage so I don’t become homeless as well as jobless, but if you’re a free subscriber, I hope you found this post interesting and/or useful even in its curtailed form; feel free to like it!]

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Home means many things, but we can be fairly sure of one thing: it is place. Usually, a building of some sort or a space in a building, though it can also be a vehicle, a tent, or other temporary shelter.

The home or homes we have lived in make their mark on us. And this week, if you’re game, you can find out some of the ways those spaces have shaped you.

If you’re chiefly writing to gain insights into yourself, perhaps seeking to heal past wounds, describing the place(s) you lived can feel refreshingly neutral. And yet, you probably already know that your wounds are especially attached to particular locations. If what we’re talking about is a ‘Big T’ trauma, don’t imaginatively go to that space just yet. If this is you, choose, in the writing exercise, to go first to the parts of ‘home’ that felt relatively safe.

If you’re writing a memoir, you might take this as a setting/location exercise. It’s vital for readers to have a concrete place to place the protagonist (you). I’m reminded of the striking beginning of J.M.Coetzee’s Boyhood:

That third-person narrative viewpoint, by the way, is a fantastic trick if you need to distance yourself from your childhood. If there’s trauma in your past, you can try using she/he/they instead of “I” when you (free)write. It will give you a bit of breathing space. We are not the same person we were when we were eight or fifteen. I mentioned the poetic sequence in Material, ‘Driving Without Lights,’ in my Friday post. All third person. It was far too painful to call that person “I” when I wrote those poems a few years later.

Polling Your Thoughts

Last week’s poll asked you to characterise your childhood as happy or unhappy. At the time of taking this screenshot, my sample size was a mere 37 people, and the sample is too skewed to apply to the general population (you’re all subscribed to a Substack called How To Evolve, after all!). But wow, it’s very interesting that no one said their childhood started unhappy and became happier. 

Perhaps, once you get kicked off on the wrong foot, it can be difficult to recover your footing before you’re into adulthood. I can see why that would be the case. On the other hand, maybe the four-tenths of you who said your childhood was “difficult to characterise” at least saw some improvement. What will be interesting is whether, if you are taking part in the Writing Home challenge, you find at the end that your childhood is easier/harder to characterise! Mental note to repeat this poll in a few weeks!

For this week’s poll, I am asking how many homes you’ve had. This has a considerable effect on your sense of stability, though, of course, if you have very loving, stable parents, that could easily counteract the effects of moving around a lot. Still, there are the issues of possibly having to adapt to new schools, losing classmates and friends, and making new ones when existing groups are established. Let me know your answer in this poll:

I had two childhood homes that I remember (deleting the two we lived in during our year in the US, which never really earned the label “home”), and they had very different vibes. If you had more than one childhood home, you could choose to consider only the most significant or choose the two that were the most contrasting. If your count is 3+, I’ll still say, for now, stick with two so that you don’t over-burden yourself at this point (although, of course, it’s up to you). So, if you lived in more than one place you remember in your childhood, you might double up on the writing exercises. A compare-and-contrast, especially if you had a happy home and an unhappy home.

Experiment in the Present Tense

I’m going to ask you to write in the present tense. This brings the reader immediacy and intimacy (even if the only reader is going to be us, that is valuable). You might notice I slip into the present tense quite often in my memoir posts for that reason.

Because when we write our lives, this is not something irrelevant that is happening “in the past”. In some very real sense, especially if we haven’t processed our emotions around certain events, this is happening now. In addition, re-running it in the present tense can sometimes allow us access to memories we had blocked off from ourselves. Important details can become vivid.

The present tense really makes the past come alive, which is why so many historical novelists (including Hilary Mantel) have taken to using it. It is why J.M. Coetzee used it (along with the third-person narrative viewpoint) in the passage above. So, I’ll encourage you to use it in this week’s exercise and see how it works for you. You can report back to me in the comments!

[This part is just for the paid community for privacy reasons, and because these gorgeous people help keep me in my precious home, but if you’re a free subscriber, I hope you found this post interesting and/or useful even in its curtailed form; feel free to like it!

Stick around for the Friday essay, which I fear may prove a little explosive, as I tackle something that is getting my goat. I knew I should’ve kept it in the backyard!]

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Why Write Happiness?

“Happiness writes white” is a popular phrase among writers who teach writing. Its usefulness is explained by Salman Rushdie thus:

Without conflict it’s hard to have drama. One of the famous lines about literature [comes from] the French writer Henry de Montherlant [who] said about happiness, that it’s almost impossible to write about. He said, ‘happiness writes in white ink on a white page’—it doesn’t show up. If people are happy, there’s no story.1

A memoir, novel, or screenplay about a happy family (where the happiness is genuine, not wallpapered over dark secrets) isn’t going to grip the reader. Conflict is the engine of every story, and without it, we can’t create narrative drive.

But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t focus on writing happiness. I can think of at least three good reasons to do so.

Contrast

Happiness is most explosive, vivid and heart-filling when set against its opposite. When a period of suicidal misery ends (as mine did) with unexpectedly falling in love, how vivid those first weeks are. Just the touch of skin means everything when it has been absent. Similarly, the shift into a broken home (through death or divorce) is more keenly felt when set against the bright memories of before. At the same time, very little is golden-then-dismal; there are usually fault lines you can, in retrospect, trace. But it is the contrast of our lives that makes them vivid.

Balance

Nothing is all bad. Indeed, as Shakespeare said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. I can think of nothing less appealing than a ‘misery memoir’. Picking out the bright spots is vital for balance, and if we mean to publish, this will offer some gulps of oxygen to our readers. And let’s face it, ourselves. Writing about the tough stuff can be emotionally draining, and we don’t want it to subsume us. Which brings me to…

Wellbeing

We get more of what we focus on. So focusing on what we love about life and on good memories is something of an antidote if you find yourself writing about dark times. This is a matter of metaphysical awareness and good sense. Yes, writing about our dysfunctional or traumatic pasts can bring both insights and relief, but we don’t want to draw more of the same towards us.

I have experienced this more than once. When I was writing a thinly veiled version of myself in an unpublished novel, things I put my protagonist through began to happen to me. You know the film Stranger Than Fiction? It started to feel like I was playing both the Emma Thompson and Will Ferrell characters simultaneously. What my protagonist was going through wasn’t fun, and I decided I’d better turn her life around fast!

More recently, while I was writing about my abusive first marriage last year, several male acquaintances started trying to manipulate me into doing their bidding! These ‘echoes’ of my past reminded me yet again, to be mindful of my focus.

So it is good to ensure that when you are writing darkness, you also write about joyful things and ideally, instil a solid gratitude practice to keep your past in its place.

Polling Your Thoughts

Last week’s poll asked your chief reason for joining the Writing Home challenge. Thank you for your responses! I’ve noted the results. It helps me to know that nearly two-thirds of you (65%) are here for writing-related help. I’ll make sure you get plenty of what you’re after.

To the third of you here for insights/healing, let me just say you’re very important to me, and this comes with the territory! Put 11th Feb 6 pm GMT (noon CST) in your calendar to join me live for some EFT tapping. I’ll send the registration link to paid members via email.

Now to this week’s poll:

What Was Your Childhood Happiness Pattern?

“Home” isn’t only about childhood homes, of course, but this week, that will be our focus. Our early years are called our “formative years” for a reason, and by exploring them, we can get a better handle on what shaped us, and insights into our subsequent patterns. We’re writing about childhood happiness this week, and before we do, I’d love for you to participate in this poll.

Happiness Writing Inspiration

In the poetry workshops I’ve run over the years, I’ve often set a “happy poem” homework. Poets get very used to writing from unhappiness since poetry answers that ache very well. So, writing about happiness stretches our muscles, pushing us gently out of our comfort zone. For a recent model of a “current life” happiness poem, I might use Jack Underwood’s ‘Happiness’. Note how the final line carries a shadow of that contrast I mentioned above.

But the poem I have favoured as a model for two decades is this one by Thomas Lux.

Refridgerator, 1957

More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.

The sheer joyful exuberance of this poem! I love to read it aloud; it lifts me every time. Try it! And spot the contrast: that jar of cherries is alight with joy because of the dullness it is set against, “an entire / childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat, /
pocked peas and … boiled potatoes”, the “chicken carcass … looking drained, dispirited, mugged.” So what can we learn from this poem about how to go about writing happiness?

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Welcome to the Writing Home Challenge!

We humans love stories—stories of resilience, survival, and transformation, stories that give us perspective on our lives. When it comes to real-life stories, we love the ones that make us feel less alone.

Since I was nine, I have spent my life writing stories. For twenty-five years, I have earned a living teaching others how to write them. This past year, I have been posting chunks of memoir on Substack, and the response has been tremendous. With the most successful posts, I feel I’ve reached a common core of experience that connects me to a whole community, which is an incredible feeling. So, I want to thank every one of you who has liked a post or left a comment and let me know that my words have touched you.

The Benefits of Memoir

Writing your life is beneficial in many ways. Making it public can help others. Keeping it private will still, however, help you. So, even if you don’t think of yourself as a writer, there is value in exploring the stories of your life.

You don’t have to believe, along with Socrates, that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. But the unexamined life will tend to get you stuck in repeating loops. Some memories snag us again and again, like a nailhead protruding from a door frame. We keep catching our clothes, scratching our bare skin. We tell ourselves, “I must do something about that,” but we don’t make time for it, and so it keeps on happening. Memories are not nailheads, though. So maybe, in the case of memories, we don’t think we can do anything about it.

As someone who transformed their life from one massive shitshow to something pretty damn good, I’m here to tell you that we can.

Whether you want to write a memoir, privately note down some of the things you have lived and learned, or gain insights into yourself and move on from memories that snag you, this 12-week writing challenge is for you. The prompts will give you the gentle jolts to get you moving. The community will support you. And over the twelve weeks, you will find out what those stories of yours really mean.

Because they are meaningful. Life is not random and meaningless. It constantly throws us little mirrors in which to see ourselves. Have you noticed patterns? Similar experiences repeating? That is meaningful information, and once we understand what it means, we can do something about it.

Exploring your life through the medium of story, acknowledging motifs contained within a narrative arc, will bring you insights and healing. Revisiting the past in creative mode makes a difference, allowing you to connect safely with past versions of yourself. That six-year-old who didn’t understand why their father moved out. That twelve-year-old who cried themselves to sleep, and nobody came. That younger you who faced a darkness it’s barely possible to speak about.

This is your chance to reach those parts of you that got frozen in the unhappiness of the past. You get to be the older, wiser you who can reach a hand into the darkness and pull them out of it. This is what I’ve been doing for nearly two decades in my own life, and I’m here now to encourage you to do the same.

Why? Because writing out the stories of my past has been profoundly transformative. I’ve found time and again that writing through the difficult stuff, allowing its structure and motifs to emerge, has brought me insights and healing. Reframing them so that the truth isn’t buried, but the light is discovered and turned up.

The Shape of the Challenge

Today, and for the next twelve weeks, you’ll get an extra post on Tuesdays, if you’re subscribed to How to Evolve. If you only want the Friday essays, you can opt out by going to your account settings: toggle off “Writing Challenges”.

I have some powerful writing exercises to share, but I’m keeping the structure fairly loose because I want to be responsive to your needs and let the shape of this Challenge develop organically as we go deeper. To some extent, I’ll be taking my lead from you, both from your comments and from polls. Let’s start with one! The more input I get from you, the more I can shape the Writing Home Challenge to your needs.

I want this whole process to feel exciting, exploratory, positive (despite the dark stuff you might explore) and nourishing. For that reason, I never want you to feel overwhelmed. This isn’t a “course”. You don’t have to feel like you’re getting behind or you “haven’t done your homework”. Just read the Tuesday email when you have a quiet moment, and then take a pen and notebook (or open your favourite word processing app if that’s what you prefer) and follow along with the writing exercise to see where it takes you. You can give it five minutes or thirty. You can do parts of it on different days. Then later, if you have a thought that came out of the writing exercise, but only popped up when you were in the shower or doing the washing up (very creative times/places in my experience) jot that down too. If you have associated dreams, record them (on paper, screen or voicenote). See what your subconscious has to say about it, as the days unfold.

Today’s starter is free, but as we go deeper, the prompts and comment sections will be reserved for paid members for privacy. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber and want to try a month, you can do so for less than the price of two cups of coffee.

Okay, deep breath, let’s jump in!

First things First: What is “home” anyway?

I’ve been watching the responses to people losing their homes in the LA fires. I cannot think of anything more devastating. As my offspring will tell you, if I’m going on holiday and leaving them in charge for a while, they will say, “I’ll try not to set the house on fire” because they know it is my worst nightmare. Bastards. Trust me to raise some darkly funny ones.

Home is hugely important to me because, for the longest time, I didn’t feel like I had one. Sure, I used the word “home” to describe the place I had a key to, the place I rested my head at night. “I’m off home,” I’d say. But between the ages of eight and thirty-four, “home” didn’t necessarily mean safety and comfort. So this lovely house where I’ve finally been able to put down some roots, and which feels truly my own, is a very precious home indeed.

In this challenge, we’ll be exploring “home” in all its many guises. Where you go with it will be up to you (and your subconscious, which I will encourage you to allow to take the steering wheel fairly often!). But let’s start by exploring the whole subject at the top level. We’re going to do some freewriting.

If you’re not familiar with freewriting, the fundamentals (both execution and the reasons behind it) are here: The Creative Process in a Nutshell. Read that post, then return!

What you need for the exercise

A timer

Be aware that timers on your phone can be distracting (thanks, phone!), so if you have any other kind of timer available, use that. I have a smartwatch which does the job.

Free-flowing pen/large paper pad (computer for touch-typists)

Speed is of the essence, so choose the medium that allows you to keep up with your thoughts, or as close as possible. That’s handwriting, if you can’t touch type. Two-finger typing, or typing on your phone, just isn’t fast enough. You’re trying to get ahead of your ability to think of the next word. You need to be going so fast that you just have to take whatever your subconscious gives you. You want as direct a connection between your thoughts and the page as you can get and nothing in the way of your flow. Set yourself up for maximum speed.

This means, if you’re writing by hand, that a free-flowing pen is essential. Ballpoint biros don’t make the cut. Pencils, too, cause problems (leads break or they need sharpening suddenly ). You don’t want interruptions or distractions. My pen of choice is the Uni-ball Eye Fine UB-157 (0.7mm tip).

Small notebooks mean you spend too much time turning the page, so ideally, have an A4/Legal Letter-sized pad at your disposal. If you don’t have the right stuff with you, get as close to it as possible for now: the flowiest implement, the largest writing piece of paper. Put the rest on your shopping list!

A quiet, private space

Sure, you could do this in a crowded cafe, but not if anyone can see what you’re writing (which will make you self-conscious) and not if the noise is a distraction. Conversations nearby, or talk radio, will get in the way. Make sure you have noise-cancelling headphones, focus music (I use brain.fm) or silence.

The rules

No stopping, no crossing out, no delete key, no going back. Just flow forward rapidly. Grammar and spelling don’t matter. You are writing what you think, not thinking what to write. The aim is to empty the contents of your mind onto the page as rapidly as you can.

The process is one of listening for the next word your mind gives you. You can let go and let it do the “work”. It can take a little while to relax into this, but once you do, you are just allowing the words to come through. You are the secretary. The amanuensis. Nothing more.

If it’s garbage, no worries, you’re doing it perfectly. If you feel yourself ‘getting stuck,’ don’t stop writing, just write what you’re thinking e.g.

oh no, I’m getting stuck, I can’t think what to write next, the words just aren’t coming, oh yes, that’s right, I’m not supposed to be thinking what to write, I’m supposed to be letting it come, writing about home, writing about home…

and repeat the prompt as necessary. Write out the prompt a few times until you get “unstuck”. Yes, I am giving you a prompt, in a minute. You have been very patient, but we are nearly there.

Get ready

Get ready. Get ready to write REALLY fast and not stop until the timer goes off. Set the time for 5 minutes, or 10 if you are experienced at freewriting. When you are ready to write, start the time and press play for the prompt. Write down what I say and then KEEP ON WRITING until the timer goes off. When it does, you can finish whatever sentence you were writing. Don’t say No to the Flow.

Okay, here we go!

The prompt:

Afterwards

Okay, how was that? Read through what you wrote, and underline or highlight anything that interests you. Any phrase at all that catches your eye.

• Did you write anything that surprised you?

• Did a memory come up that you’d forgotten?

• Did it get emotional?

• Were there both bright spots and dark spots?

• Did you go completely off-topic?

In the comments, please share your experience of doing this exercise, especially if something unexpected came up. Also, please let me know how easy or difficult it was to let go and allow the flow of words to just come through you.

If you found it difficult, practice is key. The more you do this, the more natural it begins to feel.

That might be enough for you for now, you decide. But if you want to take it further, choose one element, one phrase or image from your first piece of freewriting, and use that as a prompt. Set your time again (you can add 5 minutes to time if you like) and do another bout of freewriting. See where it goes. Is something interesting emerging?

Development

Freewriting is just the clay, not the pot. But maybe now you have some clay to work with. Is there something here that is calling to you? Is there something you’d like to develop further? When you have time, write on, more thoughtfully, but still with ease and looseness (no timer) and see what arises. This might be in the form of prose or poetry, whatever you are comfortable with; whatever it feels like it needs to be.

I’ll be back in your inbox next Tuesday with another Writing Home prompt, and we’ll go a little deeper.

And remember, your like costs you nothing, but to me, it is priceless. It might be the ‘like’ that puts this post in front of someone who really needs it. So go ahead and light up that heart :-).

Until next time!

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