Thursday, November 22, 2007 Writing Without Teachers, What a
Concept! The basic philosophy of the book is that there is no
‘bad writing’ and that we have to give ourselves permission to
write everything that is in our thoughts in order to get to the
writing that has more focus and energy to it. The first three
sections of this book are set up to help anyone interested in
writing to do just that. Section one is an explanation of how
the freewriting exercises work. It's a simple method for
generating writing by simply timing yourself for ten or twenty
minutes, then writing as fast as you can without stopping. The
key is to not think about what you're writing but to simply
write. There are no rules to worry about. Grammar, spelling,
syntax, logic are put on the back burner. You simply write what
ever is on your mind as fast as you can until the time is up.
The reasoning behind this, according to Elbow, is that when we
worry about whether we are doing it right we're in the process
of editing and we don’t just edi