Why all the freewriting in the world couldn’t help me to publish more
I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but never managed to consistently write.
One day I heard about a simple technique called freewriting, which promised to make writing effortless.
Writing had always felt excruciatingly difficult to me, so naturally I was thrilled!
But sadly, after several months of stream-of-consciousness writing, filling hundreds of pages along the way, I still struggled with exactly the same problems that I struggled with before.
For a while, I was puzzled how a technique that was so widely praised could have failed me. But recently, I stumbled across the answer in the book “Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte.
The author suggests that creative work happens in two distinct phases:
- Diverge: this phase is all about exploration. Here, we try to look at a problem from various perspectives and collect as many ideas as possible. We open up the space of possibility.
- Converge: we’ve done our research, now we’ll narrow down on one particular solution. Our goal is to choose the best path through the many options we’ve discovered earlier. In choosing one path, we discard all the others.
Reading this explanation, I began to understand why freewriting wasn’t delivering the results I was looking for!
***Freewriting* is a discovery technique (and a great one at that)!** It allows you to begin with barely anything, get into the flow, and then spiral into a broad exploration of a topic. After such a session, I usually end up with a few new insights and many more questions.
This is great when you need to generate new ideas, but that’s not something I usually struggle with.
So no wonder that freewriting didn’t work for me. It was simply the wrong tool for the job!
A little later, I realized something else: my lack of progress came from a failure to converge!
So this is why making a writing pact has been working so well for me; all I needed was a daily reminder to stop exploring, to choose an idea, and to actually write about it.