I write what I feel. My writing serves a purpose- to expel the intrusive thoughts still lingering in my brain, and replace them with better ones. My best poems have come from places that have not yet healed, but are starting to. Where I am now as a writer is unique to me, just as my previous phases have been. Writers develop and change over time, discovering and discarding different methods of writing like snakes and skins. One method is Peter Elbow’s “Freewriting.” Personally, I’m not in a place in which I can freewrite, nor have I been in the past. I’m too cautious about making mistakes, too overwhelmed at the freedom to mess up. I am afraid of writing because it means failing and trying again, so I am even more so afraid of freewriting, because it implies I will mess up.

Elbow says, “The only requirement is that you must never stop,” in reference to his freewriting method (4 Elbow). Instantly, a thousand ‘what if’s surround my brain, screaming. What if I don’t know what to say? What if something happens? What if I write a sentence all wrong? In my current state of being and writing, these are all things that give me pause to try freewriting in its most raw form: just me, the pen, and the paper. I write on a laptop because I can change mistakes and no one will see them. I am terrified of failure and anything that might allude to it. I can write ten-million good sentences and only one mistake will crumble any sense of well-doing. Freewriting is scary.

Writing, for me, is generally scary. I don’t know what will change about me through writing. When I first started writing poetry, I refused to edit. I thought it would ruin the originality of it, smother the uniqueness. Then, one day, I revised a poem I didn’t care about just to see what would happen. It worked. I enjoyed it. I cut off the fat and cured the meat. I liked looking at it now, I cared about it. Thus began my incredible attachment to editing. I will revise and redraft like a madman with a final copy of his novel due the next day, even as I am writing. I’m a horrible perfectionist, which, in some ways inhibits the flow of writing. If there is a sentence I believe is written wrong, I cannot make myself go beyond a sentence or two before I simply must rewrite it. Waiting to fix my mistakes is no longer something I can do, much less only writing one total draft. This is what bothers me about freewriting, “[it] must never be evaluated at all” … “there must be no discussion or comment at all” (5 Elbow). I can hardly write without editing anymore. Maybe when I first wrote this is what I could do but now? Never. 

This likely indicates I need to loosen up about my writing, to let it go, shed this skin and find a comfortable one, balanced between no editing and too much editing. There is no one specific way to write, naturally, as there are far too many writers in the world to find one “correct” way to go about it. I have been writing for years and I am still working on becoming a better writer. What happens when I let go of all my experience writing, all the things I have been practicing in writing for years? To recall the beginning of this essay: I am afraid. Writing is what heals and helps me, and to suddenly change that format is to leave myself vulnerable to an emotional space I want to heal. In essence, Elbow’s method of freewriting challenges my current method, and makes me afraid of what I might open myself up to. I would rather stay safe in my monotony than radically change my opinion and have it fail.

This boils down to my feelings of fear. Fear of change and fear of failure. If I change my writing in the lines of Elbow’s advice, will I continue to write in a way that heals me? If I change, what if I fail at the writing part itself now? I have sustained one style of writing for so long it seems I am cemented in it, and now have become too afraid to seek out a new way of going about it. My obsession over editing and constant fixing are signs of my fears, and maybe, just maybe, if I change my writing habits, I will be able to overcome those fears.

Works Cited:

Elbow, Peter.  “Freewriting.”  The St. Martin’s Custom Reader.  Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom and Louise Z. Smith.  Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2002.  pp. 34-37.