Entries by Kathy Hopewell
The Blog: a guided tour
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 […]
Breton’s Nadja and my novel-in-waiting
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 […]
Freewriting in Peformance
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 […]
Where Does Freewriting Come From?
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 […]
Does Freewriting Work?
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 […]