I was fascinated to read a Medium post by Alisa Wolf on the topic of group freewriting. She notes that freewriting in a group is “like going to a yoga class versus doing poses on your own at home.” It creates a structure that limits distractions and pushes you to do more than you might do on your own.
I had never thought of trying something like this. Mostly I do better writing on my own – be it freewriting or regular “structured” writing. If someone is with me, I have the tendency to get distracted, or want to chat and goof around. Of course, now that we cannot be “around” people, I might try to set something up on Zoom, and create a container for a virtual group freewrite.
Wolf concludes, “The point of group freewrites — or any freewrite, for that matter — is the process, not the product. In a group freewrite, we arrive without an agenda and write into the unknown. We realize we’re not going anywhere, so we might as well have fun. We run with something we might have been tempted, on our own, to self-edit. Best of all, we surprise ourselves with how inventive we can be when we’re not trying so hard to write something ‘good.’”