The first college class I ever sat down in was English 101. I’d already been writing as a hobby for years, so I don’t think my hormonal, egocentric teenage brain expected to learn much. But one of the first things the professor had us do turned out to be the single most useful writing exercise anyone has ever taught me. I’ve found it to be not only beneficial as a writer, but deeply calming and enjoyable, and to this day I return to it as often as I possibly can. That exercise was freewriting.

Freewriting is the practice of writing from your stream of consciousness. It can be whatever pops into your head: fiction, poetry, journaling, or simply a jumble of words. If you don’t know what to write, you write just that: I don’t know what to write. Anything to keep the pen moving. It’s a pure outpouring of thought and emotion, with no purpose other than the feeling of release that comes with creating it.

My English 101 professor used it as a warm-up at the beginning of class. Every morning, he’d set a timer and we’d all spend ten minutes just dumping words out of our brains and onto the page. We were never asked to share the results with anyone, only to pour out whatever words were floating around in our heads, without worrying about quality or correctness. When we were done, we’d file it away, or crumple it up, or delete it, or just shove it deep in our backpacks before continuing on with the lecture for that day.

Immediately, I remember noticing a tangible difference between how I felt before and after this exercise. It was an early morning class, and I’d usually come in feeling tired, unmotivated, and, for want of a better word, creatively constipated. I am about as far from a morning person as it’s possible to be, and I’ve always done most of my best writing late at night. When I walked into those morning classes, writing was the absolute last thing I wanted to do.

But after freewriting? After freewriting, I felt like I’d just unloaded a ten pound brick from the inside of my head. The spigot of creativity had been turned on. I found myself feeling focused, engaged, and inspired — all things I can safely say I never experienced in an 8:30 AM class again. It was like something had been jamming up the works, and freewriting had cleared it out.

Freewriting has been around for ages, but according to MIT’s department of Global Studies & Languages, it was formalized by Peter Elbow in 1973. He emphasized that the key to freewriting was not stopping. If your pen isn’t wiggling or your keyboard isn’t clacking, you’re doing something wrong. You shouldn’t be worrying about spelling, grammar, or any other technical elements of what’s going down on the page. You shouldn’t actually be thinking about what’s going down on the page at all. You could literally do this exercise blindfolded, and the results would probably be roughly the same.

The link I cited above presents freewriting as a strategy for formulating the beginnings of a specific work, and suggests focusing on a particular prompt or topic as you write. You can do that (and in fact, that’s one of the things I talked about in my post on writing romance subplots), but there’s a lot to be said for doing this with no prompt in mind as well.

Here are a few of the benefits of freewriting with no prompt:

1. Relieving milder forms of writer’s block.

I didn’t talk about this in my post on writer’s block from back in March, because that post was mainly focused on a more severe form of writer’s block: the one that stops projects completely and makes you want to throw your entire manuscript out the window. But if your block is less about what should happen and more about simply figuring out what words to put on the page, freewriting is a good place to start.

Like I said, a big thing freewriting does is unblock the creative channels in your mind that may be gummed up by the detritus of everyday thoughts and anxieties. You may not even realize the extent to which this is happening. By letting these things out, skimming off that top layer of sludge in your mind and slapping it down on paper, you can expose the creative potential hidden underneath. This is closely related to the second benefit of freewriting, which is…

2. Stress relief.

There’s actually one other person besides that professor who’s recommended freewriting to me, although not in the same words: my therapist. When I sought counseling in college for severe anxiety, my therapist brought up freewriting in one of our early conversations in the context of journaling. Freewriting is a wonderful balm for a chaotic and overwhelmed mind. It’s something I come back to a lot in times of stress or overpowering emotion, as a way to connect with what I’m feeling, clear my mind, and find my focus again.

Now, obviously if you’re struggling with serious mental health issues, you should seek professional help and not just listen to some random blogger on the internet. Freewriting, although beneficial, will not single-handedly cure your anxiety, and I would not be in any position to recommend it for that even if it did. But as a journaling tool for everyday stress relief and for boosting your focus and calm when you’ve got a lot going on in your life, freewriting is a nifty tool to have in your back pocket.

3. Making people fall in love with writing.

Freewriting is a pure expression of creativity — a totally unfiltered window into the way your mind generates and expresses ideas. And that feeling of pure creation is a big reason why many of us got into writing in the first place. If you think back to the first story you ever wrote, what was the feeling you had while writing it? If you’re anything like most writers, you probably weren’t thinking too hard about the structure of your plot, or the technical details of foreshadowing and character development, or the marketability of your genre. You didn’t edit, revise, or outline. You just… wrote.

My earliest memory of writing down a story was when I was five or six, and bless my past self’s little heart, I typed it out in 32-point, bright yellow font (actually, I think some parts of it were in hot pink, and if memory serves, it may have featured some excerpts in the Wingdings font, for, I guess… stylistic reasons?). Who knows what I was thinking, but I can tell you right now, no part of that document was fit for human consumption. Least of all the actual content. But that wasn’t the point. I wasn’t creating something cohesive, and I wasn’t trying to. I was simply writing down the words as they came into my head. It was, and still is, an incredible feeling. It was basically freewriting.

For this reason, I highly recommend freewriting as an exercise for beginner writers — especially students — who may not be totally sold on writing as a hobby, or are just trying it out to see what all the fuss is about. This is where the fun happens, y’all. Amid all the struggle and stress of revisions and feedback and fixing our mistakes, this is where writers are getting a solid 90% of our endorphins from.

So try freewriting! Grab a piece of paper or a blank word document and just let go. Don’t show it to anyone. You don’t even have to keep it for yourself. Today, the point isn’t what’s on the page. The point is you, and the words you have inside you just waiting to get out.

Happy (free)writing.