It was January 2015 when, inspired by a weekend of baking bread with Mick Hartley The Partisan Baker, I composed my first post for The Freewriter’s Companion. I had two aims. One was to popularize freewriting, a liberating and fertile method of smashing writing blocks and of generating material that can form the basis of […]
My novel Swimming with Tigers is based on a real historical person connected to surrealism in the 1920s known as Nadja. In this post I want to share with you how I used a combination of research and freewriting to transform this shadowy figure from history into the character of Suzanne in my novel. I […]
This month I have four short videos of writers reading their own work for you to enjoy. All were filmed at a free poetry and music festival in Bangor, North Wales, earlier this year. This annual festival is called “Curiad Bangor” or, in English, “Bangor Pulse” which is a great, inclusive, name covering anything with […]
I began this website because, as a lecturer on Surrealism and a private addict of freewriting, I was amazed that no one seemed to connect the two. Surrealism comes from Freud, via Breton The Surrealist movement was kicked off by the practice of automatic writing (art came later). Surrealist automatic writing uses essentially the same […]
My students say yes, it certainly does! Most creative writing courses will have an element of rough, initial drafts done either in the classroom or as part of the process of producing work for assessment. The course I have just finished teaching, however, put the practice of doing intense, short bursts of unplanned writing (a […]
This month I am delighted to be the guest of the wonderful Rosanne Bane on her website Bane of Your Resistance. Rosanne’s approach is very similar to my own in the importance she ascribes to the hidden processes of creativity. She has been a joy to work with and I want to thank her […]
Every Friday morning since the beginning of January I have been sending ten-minute freewriting exercises to my subscribers completely free of charge. Each one contains a new freewriting prompt plus some advice about how to go about using it (see some examples here). The prompts are specifically designed to work with the basic unit of […]
The artist Dorothea Tanning lived to the age of 101. Her long career as a painter, sculptor and writer is being celebrated now at Tate Modern in London. And what a celebration! For as long as Dali is better known than Dora Maar and Man Ray outstrips Lee Miller in terms of fame, the mounting […]
I’m excited to say that my post How to Use Freewriting to Supercharge Your Work is up at WRITE TO DONE, a great website that really does have “unmissable articles about writing”! I’d like to thank Laura, the editor, for having me as a guest blogger, and to welcome Write to Done readers to my […]
Every Saturday morning, in a side-room of the wonderful Kyffin Café Deli in Bangor, North Wales, I now have the pleasure of introducing people to the practice of freewriting. This is because I am running a course there, based on freewriting, called Spontaneous Creative Writing and eighteen people have signed up for it. Going back […]