Elbow, Peter. "Freewriting Exercises." Writing Without Teachers. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.

"The most effective way I know to improve your writing is to do freewriting exercises regularly. At least three times a week. They are sometimes called "automatic writing," "babbling," or "jabbering" exercises. The idea is simply to write for ten minutes (later on, perhaps fifteen or twenty). Don't stop for anything. Go quickly without rushing. Never stop to look back, to cross something out, to wonder how to spell something, to wonder what word or thought to use, or to think about what you are doing" (3).

Elbow rightly points out that sometimes the greatest writer's block can be the writer's fear of needing to be correct: correct in following a prescribed path and thesis, an outline, a form, grammatical correctness. The writer becomes so obsessed with putting down the "right" word that none come at all. As I tell my students, you have to get the pencil moving for awhile before the final product comes out. Writing can be thinking -- and paper is cheap and can be thrown away. Editing the work can come later -- we have to get our thoughts on paper first. "Editing, in itself, is not the problem. Editing is usually necessary if we want to end up with something satisfactory. The problem is that editing goes on at the same time as producing" (5). We have to learn to think on the page first, and then decide what will ultimately go into the finished work. "The habit of compulsive, premature editing doesn't just make writing hard. It also makes writing dead. Your voice is damped out by all the interruptions, changes, and hesitations between the consciousness and the page" (6).