as Peter Elbow points out: ‘So much writing time and energy is spent not writing: wondering, worrying, crossing out, having second, third and fourth thoughts… [freewriting] helps you learn simply to get on with it and not be held back by worries about whether these are good words or the right words.’3

What question do I need to ask myself right now?

Focusing on questions rather than answers is surprisingly freeing: when you’re ONLY allowed to come up with questions for which there is no obligation to suggest answers, the process feels playful and unpressured. As Gregerson puts it: ‘Brainstorming for questions rather than answers makes it easier to push past cognitive biases and venture into

When it comes to communicating your ideas to other people, being able to show them what you mean visually is massively more impactful and effective than trying to describe it in words. And if you can create a distinctive model that you can copyright and share, and which other people use and share with a nod to you, you have developed a distinctive

One of the main reasons to engage in exploratory writing is that it allows you to uncover something that’s worth saying. It’s trivially easy to be a passive recipient of other people’s content – this is idea consumption and doesn’t benefit anyone other than yourself. It’s relatively easy to share other people’s ideas along with your initial

Often the truth relates to our most fundamental needs, for example for recognition, safety, freedom and so on. Learning to identify our own ‘fingerprint needs’ (as Alice Sheldon calls them2) can

Morning Pages are a key practice in The Artist’s Way, her 12-week course aimed at awakening creativity. But if you’re using freewriting as a tool for business thinking rather than as a purely creative exercise, it can be more helpful to start with a prompt.

As you’ve already discovered, the process of sketching out your ideas visually gives you a different perspective to that of writing them out in a linear way. Not necessarily better, just different, and in the exploratory phase you want as many different ways of understanding your material as possible, because each new angle you try will show you

In this exercise, we’re going to explore how these objects shed metaphorical light on an issue you’re facing. So that’s the final step: select a live problem or situation that you’d like a fresh perspective on. It could be a tricky relationship, a resourcing or structural issue, anything.