Effort need not only be the rigors of hard focus. Creative effort involves play, exploration and invention. Free writing is a magical way to bypass the controlling, fearful part of most of us that arises in the face of imaginative practice. To free write, get some paper and a pen. (It is definitely possible to free write on a computer if you can type fast enough. Experiment with both, and note the effects, if any, of each technology on your style.) Pick a starter phrase–a line from a book of poems or a newspaper. (These used to be handy when I started freewriting. Less so now, except online.) Natalie Goldberg, the guru of free writing as a practice, lists rules. The ones I remember off the top of my head are: 1. Keep your hand moving. 2. Don’t think. 3. Be specific. Just put whatever arises on paper. It’s a bit like meditating except instead of watching your thoughts, you record them without attaching to them. It’s a tremendous, freeing, generative tool. It can help you tap into playing with language, taking risks with image, jotting down bold truths from which you might otherwise shy away. Like exercise, it will keep you in shape for any sort of writing you need to do, and it can be enlisted for writing drafts of your scenes for your project. That’s called focused free writing: pick a scene and free write that scene or pick a character and free write a dialog with that character. Stay loose, keep your hand moving, and circle your area of focus. Don’t think you have to get stuck in your worries. Take aim, and write.
A Practical Alphabet for Writers: Find all the letters so far at https://bookwritingworld.com/blogs/