Freewriting with an Executioner’s Ax.

Oh my. Freewriting is the practice popularly taught in college composition courses: just write, keep going, pen to the page, and don’t worry about anything. Keep going and you will enter a “free” zone — the “flow” — and your originality appears! The idea is that when you try to write in the ordinary, non-zone, way, you are always hostage to your fears and inhibitions: you are blocked from the creative you that lies downtrodden, underneath. Kerouac said he wrote “On The Road” this way, taping all his typewriter pages into one long roll and just typing and typing and typing. …. So now comes Flowstate, a writing program that blocks out everything that might distract you and focuses you on the page of writing. Other writing programs have the option to do this too: Word and Scrivener and many others. BUT there’s something more in Flowstate. With this cruel program you set the amount of time you want to write, to be in the flow, and then the distracting world is shut out and the blank page appears and you start. But here’s the medieval punishment part. If you stop writing for five seconds — 1,2,3,4,5— everything you have written in that session fades away. Fades away, as in forever. So keep typing. So what you have here is touchy-feely contemporary writing theory designed to bring out your (assumed) inner creativity — combined with severe punishment! Kinky, no? Oh, did I say that I love it? It works.

Jdb9 about Flowstate