It’s the winter of 1938. A bitterly cold day in the London suburb of Hampstead.
You’re in a downstairs room, beside a fireplace, reclining on Sigmund Freud’s couch.
And he’s listening as you reveal the stream of tangled thoughts which occupy your head.
You’re engaged in free association, Freud’s psychoanalytic method in which he encouraged patients to say whatever came to mind, ‘free’ of censorship or logical organisation.
Freud believed that by bypassing conscious filtering, patients would reveal unconscious thoughts, desires, conflicts, and memories that were otherwise repressed or hidden.
This was based upon his iceberg model of the mind, in which ‘consciousness’ was the small sliver above the surface and the unconscious a vast mass submerged beneath the waterline.
According to Freud, our unconscious contains material that our conscious mind can’t directly access, because we’ve repressed, forgotten, or otherwise buried it.
The practice of freewriting operates on much the same fundamental principle.
It’s just translated to the written word.
Freewriting is one of the most underrated weapons in the writer’s arsenal.
Read any ‘how to write’ guide and you’ll find others using it in some form or another.
For example, Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, recommends setting a kitchen timer to force consistent output without stopping (within a constrained timeframe).
For travel writers, freewriting offers a valuable dual purpose.
It can help you preserve first impressions and the other raw material that makes stories come alive.
More importantly, it may nudge at the questions that turn a surface-level story into something deeper and more meaningful.
What is freewriting?
Freewriting is to be distinguished from ‘writing for free’. It’s not the sort of writing which wordsmiths are constantly being asked to do for ‘exposure’ rather than pay.
It’s the practice of writing whatever comes to mind, quickly and continuously, without stopping to edit, judge, or organise your thoughts.
Pretend you’re on Freud’s couch, but you’re writing instead of speaking.
(Side note: You can visit Freud’s former home and see the famous psychoanalytic couch at the fascinating Freud Museum London.)
Freewriting isn’t just a warm-up exercise – though it can help you warm up.
It’s a technique pioneered by Peter Elbow in the 1970s who noted that it is also called automatic writing, babbling, or jabbering exercises.
The concept is deceptively simple: write continuously for a short, set period without stopping, without editing, and without concerning yourself with grammar, structure, or making sense.
The goal isn’t to produce polished prose.
Rather, freewriting acts to bypass your inner critic and access thoughts, observations, and connections that surface-level thinking misses.
For travel writers, it captures the immediacy of experience which might include anything from fragments of conversation and the questions you have, to the sensory details that seem insignificant in the moment but later become consequential.
Freewriting is messy, incomplete and sometimes contradictory.
It resists the polish of hindsight.
Freewriting ‘tricks’ your brain into saying what it really thinks and feels about a destination.
Travel writer Jay Artale says freewriting helps writers tap into their emotional core and thus avoid producing one-dimensional content.
For when you’re not connecting emotionally with a destination, there’s a tendency to rely on cliches, or to produce generic content that reads like everything else out there.
Freewriting and Freud’s free association technique both work as excavation tools.
They create a pathway for unconscious material to surface.
You can use writing prompts to get you started, or just start with a blank page and a pen and see what comes out of it.
(Click here to get your hands on 14 freewriting prompts designed especially for travel writers.)
Writers who try freewriting are often surprised at what they unearth, in the form of connections they didn’t know they’d make, memories they’d forgotten, or insights that feel like they came from somewhere (or something) other than their own cognition.
(Read how I took notes on a multi-day hike, in How I Wrote It: Braying for Love.)
The benefits of freewriting
It preserves first impressions
Travel writing needs to capture the immediacy of being in a new destination – from the sensory detail to the contradictions. But memory is a ruthless editor. It quickly starts organising, categorising, and polishing your impressions into something tidier and less true. Freewriting captures your raw, unfiltered responses before your mind files them away under ‘got it’ and moves on. To read more about writing stories only you could have written, read: How to pen authentic stories: 8 proven writing tips.
It transcends writer’s block
Freewriting short-circuits the perfectionism that contributes to writer’s block by giving you permission to write nonsense. Ironically, this produces better raw material than just staring at a blank page waiting for a tap on the shoulder from the Muse. Moving your hand across the page (or fingers across the keyboard) creates momentum to bypass the internal critic and into a flow state. (Want more on combatting writer’s block? Read: Three reasons you’re blocked and what science says about breaking through.)
It records the questions
Your questions are often more interesting than your conclusions. ‘Why does everyone here eat standing up?’ or ‘Why are there so many stray dogs?’ or ‘What’s the word for this feeling?’ These unresolved wonderings invite readers into your process of discovery rather than presenting them with finished, authoritative thoughts.
It reveals patterns invisible to the conscious eye
When you engage in freewriting throughout a trip, patterns emerge that you didn’t know you were seeing. For example, you might notice you keep returning to observations, or light, or water, or the ways that strangers interact. In the piece of freewriting I’ve shared below, I kept returning to the niggling idea of extinct creatures brought back to life. In much the same way, these recurring threads may form the backbone of your favourite stories.
It generates unexpected material
Freewriting doesn’t have an agenda. The bizarre associations, the conversations you overhear, or the moments something caught your attention for no apparent reason can all be (unexpectedly) captured during freewriting session. I sometimes think of freewriting like an advent calendar that’s available year-round. There’s a delicious little surprise behind every door, but you can’t always spot where the doors are or predict what’s behind them.
What does freewriting look like?
Below is an example of what freewriting can look like.
It’s part of a 15-minute freewrite I completed when I was struggling to write a story on Chile’s lost grape, weeks after I’d returned home, when the immediacy of the whirlwind trip had worn off.
I’d forgotten one of the first things I learned in journalism school, namely that ‘The story is not in my notes. The story is in my head,’ (with thanks to Christopher Scanlan’s Reporting and Writing which now sells for a bomb on Amazon).
But I was bogged down in notes, and dates, and names. Overwhelmed with details. Unsure where to start.
So, I started the timer on my phone and began writing:
Colchagua Valley is at the heart of a mystery. The interloper had a twisted leaf, it was discovered by accident, brought back from the dead like a wooly mammoth or diprotodon. The valley is home to a huge volume of Carmenere that only survived in Chile. It lurked in vineyards, undiscovered, pretending it was Merlot. I thound this the most fascinating part of the Chilean wine story, how it was rediscovered fairly recently and is now the backbone of the Chilean wine industry. ((** is it? **)) The wineries here are world class. Hummingbirds lfy backwards. There was the library of wine owned by the Clos Apalta owners. Descend steps, go into a basement cellar, dust on the bottles, Chileans use the elements – wineries are gravity fed, minimal intervention, unique microclimates, El Dragon breathes over one side of the vineyard; it’s the Hunter Valley of Chile … such large space, wild open skies, shade and light, delicate tendrils of the vines that kept the secret all these years. The triumphant rediscovery, like bringing a thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) back to life; the deep purple berry is uncompromising in taste and flavour. How much Carmenere does Chile and is it the world leader? My attempt at wine blending – 50% Carmenere. Vineyards can look the same – some have flowers planted between the rows of vines. There are territorial birds that will swoop you. Perhapes they were the ones who kept winemakers away. Is anyone else craving a white wine? Like all serendipitous discoveries, it changed the face of Chilean winemaking.
Tips on how to make freewriting work
The biggest benefit freewriting brings is … it gets you writing.
And here, I have a confession to make: I never look forward to freewriting.
It always feels effortful. I never sit down wanting to do it. I feel resistance every time.
So here are a few ‘rules’, illustrated by the above, which make freewriting feel less painful.
Don’t edit as you go
This is the only real rule. As you can see from ramble above, spelling errors stay. Grammar mistakes stay. Typos stay. Repetition stays. Boring stays. If a sentence doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t matter. If you lose your train of thought mid-sentence, write, ‘I lost my train of thought’, as many times as you need until your brain picks up the baton again. Keep going. The one thing you don’t want is to be doing is editing as you go. Editing engages a different part of your brain – the bossy, critical, organising part that kills spontaneity stone dead.
Write by hand when possible (they say)
I don’t usually follow this rule. (And when I do follow this rule, I usually type it up afterwards anyway, so the freewrite doesn’t get lost.) There’s some research evidence that the physical act of handwriting activates a different, more complex, and more widespread network of brain regions compared to typing. This provides a compelling case to freewrite by hand. But IMHO, this is a rule that was made to be broken. If the idea of having to freewrite by hand is off-putting, then use a keyboard. No-one cares.
Date everything
What you thought on the first versus the last day of a trip reveals evolution in your understanding. Date stamps help you track that arc. (You will not remember it when you’re sitting down to write, possibly months after the event.) Dating the products of your freewriting sessions help you put your words into context and make better sense of what was happening at the time you wrote them.
Don’t expect it all to be good
Most of what you freewrite will be forgettable. That’s to be expected. You must generate volume to find a few perfect fragments. It’s a little like panning for gold, in that you need to sift through a lot of sediment to find a few valuable nuggets. In the example above, I went off down a few dead ends and cliches (e.g., ‘Hummingbirds fly backwards’, ‘The wineries here are world class’) before I got to the good stuff about dead things being brought back to life. And the bit about the thylacine did make it into the final draft.
Don’t stop to answer the questions that come up
Every freewriting session seems to bring up a handful of questions that need further clarification. For example, I wrote above, ‘(Carmenère) is now the backbone of the Chilean wine industry. ((** is it? **))’ Do not, under any circumstances, interrupt a freewrite to go and source the answer. Record the question that nags at your attention as briefly as you can and keep going. You can always go and fact-check later. (And, in case you’re wondering, no. Carmenère is not the backbone of the Chilean wine industry. That would be Cabernet Sauvignon.)
Review your freewriting later (but not too much later)
Give yourself at least a few days of distance before you read through your freewriting with a highlighter. The best stuff will leap out at you. You’ll be stunned at the details you’d forgotten. The patterns you didn’t know you were tracking will emerge. And you might find fragments of writing that don’t fit into the piece you’re writing now, but are worth exploring further. The section of freewriting above went on to discuss details of an interpersonal interaction that had (absolutely, positively) no place in a story about Carmenère but served as starting point for a totally different personal essay.
The permission to be messy
The most important thing freewriting gives travel writers is permission to be messy, uncertain, and incomplete. Travel itself is messy. If you’re anything like me, you spend most of your time disoriented, lost, and adjusting your understanding. Freewriting honours that reality instead of pretending you arrived at your finished article with perfect clarity.
When you’re on the road, freewrite as often as you can. You won’t know what matters until later, when you’re constructing your story and suddenly realise that the throwaway line you scribbled on the third day is the perfect opener.
While you’re here …
I invite you to sign up for my free 5-day writing course called Unlock Your Creative Flow. One email, once a day, for five days, plus a follow-along workbook containing further space for reflection. You’ll also join the list to receive my (semi-regular) newsletter. Sign up now!
