When I was a teenager I belonged to a Queer youth organization in my city, and they partnered with a local non-profit called Write Around Portland (WRAP) to host a weekly writing group. We met every friday for 10 weeks, and did various writing exercises. Sometimes we free-wrote. Then we shared our work with the others in the group. After 10 weeks, we were able to submit some of our work to be published. We did these 10-week workshops several times, and it was participating in these that really made me into the poet I am today.
I thought at first that this was my first experience with freewriting, but I'm remembering now that my elementary school teachers used to have us freewrite. They gave us little books with our names on them, and we would write in them for 15 minutes every morning, and then the teacher would read them and leave us little comments. I think a lot of kids used to just write about their lives, but I used to write little stories in mine. One of my stories was about a group of kids who find a monster's lunchbox, with sandwiches made of spiders, and some kind of pink milk in a thermos (I didn't know about yak milk then, which makes this kind of funny in retrospect), and then the monster comes along and eats the kids. Then I wrote a sequel about the kids inside the monster's stomach, and their attempt to get out. My teacher left me very positive comments about my creativity, and one of my stories was printed into a little spiral-bound hardcover book in the school library, which I think my mother still has. And a writer was born! Heh...
I kept freewriting after that, often in the context of school English classes. I wrote and illustrated stories throughout elementary, middle, and high school, and began to write poetry in high school as well. Sometimes a whole poem comes out at once, well formed and in need of only a few tweaks, and sometimes I slog through and revise it endlessly and toss most of it later. But it usually starts with a flash of inspiration and a freewrite.
19 tessaragabrielle
You are entered in the drawing. Thank you so much for sharing your free writing journey!! I love the monster stories! And the workshops sound fantastic!! I think one of our dreams is to have local groups get together and do this kind of workshops. The free writing we have done now for 5 month has created an amazing community. And to bring that off-line as well would be fantastic. So good to hear that it was a pivotal experience for you. Welcome the the Freewrite House!