Freewrite || Day 2
Two Almost Makes a Habit
On freewriting, habits, podcasting and authenticity on Medium
I think about the number of challenges that I’ve started and then abandoned after one day, so I’m celebrating that I made it to day 2 of this freewriting, unedited challenge.
Don’t know what I’m talking about?
Here’s Day 1:
In fact, I should go further back and credit what inspired me for this challenge: Maya L, M.A.’s piece:
I’ve encountered the concept of freewriting in at least a dozen places, but I’m betting that it was Maya’s piece that most recently planted this seed in my brain. It grew and it grew, and here we are now.
Less form, but some structure?
Whereas some writers focus on a specific topic and just unleash their emotions and thoughts on that one topic, I’m focussing on reaching a certain amount of time.
Part of it is related to what I talked about yesterday — that I find freewriting my internal monologue to be a great way to discover new topics for writing.
It’s kind of like having a shower where you’re doing something mundane, which is also when new ideas come to you. Except, because you’re in the shower, those ideas wash away as soon as you open that shower curtain.
By freewriting (or journalling), I’m still doing something relatively mundane in a way that’s perfect for organic distracting thoughts to pop up, but now I have a space to jot them down rather than let those ideas glide away.
Why not a word count?
At one point, I also wrote to meet a specific word count. It worked for a bit, and gave me such a great feeling of accomplishment, because not only did I reach the desired 1000 words a day, I could track over the months exactly how many words I’d written.
And it’s truly incredible because if you write 1000 words a day for 30 days (just a month!), you’d have written 30 000 words.
That’s basically a book?
Incredible.
There’s something about large numbers that gives my brain dopamine, because I seldom do 30k of anything else.
That being said, I found that reaching a word count kind of cut my ideas short. Sure, I could continue on beyond 1000 words and not arbitrarily stop there, but the problem with that is that I got into the flow a bit too much an just kept writing for the next few hours.
This doesn’t sound like a bad thing for most, but writing isn’t my main gig, so in a way, sometimes going overboard the allotted time I have for this hobby meant that on some level, I was procrastinating on my actual work.
A time cap
The time cap works perfectly because I’ve set it to 26 minutes. It seems like such a random and arbitrary number, but it’s actually the same length of time that I do for the pomodoro technique.
For those new to the pomodoro technique, it’s a productivity technique where you work for a certain amount of time (the standard is 25 minutes) and break for a certain amount of time (standard is 5 minutes).
It thus provides regular breaks, and uses something simple, like a kitchen timer (pomodoro) to make sure you’re not wearing yourself out before you take a break.
It was one of my top study strategies across high school and undergrad, and was the technique that helped me study for 10–14 hours a day. That’s how efficient it was.
Of course, I no longer work such insane hours and have learned to derive joy and success out of more things than school (phew! but honestly, who drilled it into poor teenage and young adult me that my only self-worth could be derived from As, because damn, that was a damaging decade).
Still, the pomodoro technique has been helpful in getting back into routines I want to build up, particularly since it’s so much more manageable to commit to doing 26 minutes of work rather than “starting a large project”. Much less daunting, much easier to begin.
You’d honestly be surprised how much one can write in 26 minutes
If I don’t edit ideas as I go, I can write up to 1000 words in 10, 15 minutes. I think that’s partially why I shifted away from word count limits for free-writing as well.
Ten to fifteen minutes isn’t a lot of time to reflect, and I deserve to commit more time to reflect and grow. I realize now that to tackle that, I could have just expanded the number of words I wrote (e.g., 2000 words) instead of switching to time, but then the “daunting number” comes into play and I feel overwhelmed by such a large number.
Brains are weird. My brain, especially, is weird.
And most of my late-twenties life is learning how to work around its quirks and mistakes so I can pretend to be exactly like everyone else.
Is it just me?
Or is everyone like this, which is why we think there is some arbitrary “normal”?
I’ve also tried a verbal version of this experience — it didn’t work
With the rise of “everyone has a podcast” energy, I also tried “free-writing” through my face hole. I only ended up confirming that I’m much better at writing than I am at free-styling anything verbally.
This also seems an opportune time to let it drop that I do have a podcast, and part of that endeavour is learning how to talk about things unscripted, with an outline, yes, but mostly unscripted.
Despite my whole spiel of asking the world to start being more accommodating to different strengths rather than equate stellar extroversion skills to some metric of success, it doesn’t take away that I still live in that world. And to make people listen, I first have to be apart of that circle. It’s a big ironic hoop.
I really admire people who are able to just think of a topic and hop on it, talk about it, and make sense. When I write this, I especially think of Dayon Cotton, whose Youtube channel is entirely unscripted.
It’s definitely a wild skill to observe as someone who doesn’t have this skill.
There was absolutely no segue
Speaking of no segues, I finally discovered Bo Burnham’s comedy pieces on Netflix, and it’s been an interesting watch.
I’m used to comedy sketches being entirely … speaking, but I like that his shows are a mixture of skits, music, etc.
It really makes me think about the boundaries we have between certain art forms, and how we like to stick to them.
Which I guess, brings me back to the concept of freewriting?
I think about how “content” on the internet swings between two trends, constantly:
- Scripted, polished content
- “Authentic” on-the-go content
We think about the early days of Youtube, where it was just people vlogging, like Kevjumba’s online rants. And then there was this whole revolution that was pretty much a race to getting the best audio, video equipment, with Youtube videos suddenly rivaling TV shows in terms of quality.
The swing between “home-grown” to “polished and perfect” is something you don’t really notice until you look back.
Then we have the podcasting space, which started with big radio stations releasing their content, polished and high in production quality. Now we have anchor.fm, which allows anyone and everyone to have their own podcast, to record on any phone.
To think about that! We went from recording rooms and sound engineers to influencers recording their chats on their iPhones via a phone app.
There’s also a similar trend between Instagram being the “hipster” platform of personal photography and updates to polished, unrealistic lifestyles selling ads for a living.
Where will Medium go next with this concept?
To me, Medium is at this interesting intersection between polished and authentic.
The format and editing is typically polished, with only the best-written articles curated or distributed, but the stories that are curated are authentic, personal stories.
I hear people lamenting about how Medium “isn’t like it used to be” in 2013 or something, and someone who joined more recently in the pandemic, it’s so interesting to see these articles.
What does it mean “to be like how it was in 2013”? What kinds of topics trended then? What kinds of writers were heard?
More importantly, what kinds of writers and topics were not heard?
It makes me wonder.
Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and you’ve reached the end of day 2’s free-write session. Stats: 1470 words, time: 26 minutes. Ps, you can listen to this and other poems re-imagined in podcast form!
Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🕳
