The Relevance of Mark Reynolds' Freewriting's Origins

By Jessica Sumalpong, Team Free Right

Abstract

     In the article Freewriting’s Origin, Mark Reynolds describes freewriting’s origins as a technique developed during the 1960s, which would then be further developed by Ken Macrorie in Uptaught. Macrorie’s development of freewriting, however, can be credited to a suggestion from Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer, a book whose suggestions on writing Reynolds claim are important contributing factors to the development of freewriting as it is widely practiced now.

Description

            Reynolds names freewriting as one of “the most widely used prewriting exercises”, claiming that teachers “like its simplicity, and students appreciate its usefulness in generating new and unexpected ideas”. He describes the modern practice of freewriting as a writing technique during the 1960s student-centered education movement “which survived its own period and the subsequent back-to-the-basics backlash of the 1970s”. Between this time and the present, freewriting has gone by multiple names such as “spontaneous writing, stream-of-consciousness writing… shotgun writing and intensive writing”.

            Reynolds then begins a discussion around the ideas of Dorothea Brande’s 1934 book Becoming a Writer, to which Ken Macriorie credits his development of freewriting as described in his 1970 book Uptaught. According to John Gardner, the purpose of Brande’s suggestions is to “lead the writer into close touch with his-her unconscious, help the writer to develop healthy habits… and guide the writer to freedom from all forms of writer’s block.” With these aims in mind, Reynolds starts to discuss Brande’s belief in the writer’s dual nature. According to Brande, a writer possesses both a conscious side, “the craftsman and the ciritc”, and an unconscious side, “the artist’s side… the emotional and childlike side”. While claiming that a writer must work with both of these sides, Brande focuses upon the unconscious by “suggesting a program of writing to allow writers to cultivate the unconscious and thereby have the two sides functioning harmoniously” (Reynolds 81). When this occurs, according to Brande, “[the two sides] play endlessly back and forth into each other’s hands, strengthening, inciting, relieving each other in such a way that the resulting personality, the integral character, is made more balanced, mellow, energetic, and profound”.

             According to Reynolds, Brande’s program for harnessing the unconscious side of a writer begins with first learning to “hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm”, for which she suggests two exercises. First, she suggests to wake early each morning and begin immediately writing anything that comes to mind, and second, to “simply write for 15 minutes each day at a specific time, anything at all” or rather “make writing a daily habit” (Reynolds 82). In doing so, one supposedly gains greater control, self-knowledge, and greater ease with the writing process. After this, the writer is to read what he or she has written in order to take in its ideas and possibilities. According to Brande, these “spontaneous manuscripts” can often “with some shaping… be turned into satisfactory finished work” that has a “fresh unforced tone which is striking”. 

Commentary

     I find that Reynolds’ discussion on the origins of freewriting and the ideas upon which modern freewriting is based valuable to the development and refinement of my group’s project. Brande’s suggestions for writers upon which Ken Macrorie based his development of freewriting, which Reynolds cites and elaborates upon, lend insight into a proposed aims of freewriting such as being able to best bring forth the writer’s unconscious mind onto the page. Understanding this as an aim of freewriting benefits my group in both further developing our application as well as further refining our project’s main question or purpose. We propose that freewriting is an important exercise because it is a means through which practiced and unpracticed writers alike can find and develop his or her written voice. Reynolds’ discussion deepens our claims by saying that it is a means through which a writer can bring forth the potential of their “unconscious” mind, while also lending us the language to properly clearly this idea.

Potential limitations or disadvantages to this source are that it is rather short in length and that its limited content is chiefly concerned with only some of Brande’s ideas from Becoming a Writer. However, the work does serve as both an introduction to Brande and Macrorie’s works as well as a partial summary of Brande’s ideas, which saves us the time of having to read the entire work (though it is likely in our best interests to read other relevant sections of the book, of course).

Resources for Further Study

Brande, Dorothea.Becoming a Writer. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1981. Print.

Fox, Deborah and Suhor, Charles. "Limitations Of Free Writing." The English Journal 75.8 (1986): 34-36. JSTOR. Web. 13 Nov. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/819077>.

Macrorie, Ken.Uptaught. New York: Hayden Book, 1970. Print.

Romano, Tom. "The Power of Voice." EBSCO Host. Educational Leadership, n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.           <http%3A%2F%2Fweb.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.ucsb.edu%3A2048%2Fehost%2Fpdfviewer%2Fpdfviewer%3Fsid%3Dd528e34b-6e79-4f3d-a155-3abd5fe14cde%2540sessionmgr112%26vid%3D10%26hid%3D101>.