Freewriting
Writing without stopping for a set time, with no correction or censorship — to bypass the inner critic.
Freewriting means writing without interruption for a fixed duration (ten, fifteen, twenty minutes), without rereading, correcting or judging — if you dry up, you write that you're drying up, and the hand keeps moving. The technique, theorized notably by Peter Elbow in Writing Without Teachers (1973), aims to decouple production from evaluation: the inner critic can't censor what moves faster than it does.
Its uses: unlocking a session that won't start, exploring a character or scene with no stakes, recovering a spontaneous voice that constant rereading smothers. The material produced is raw and largely disposable — that's its definition, not its failure: freewriting is a warm-up, not a draft.
Example
Timer set to 15 minutes, prompt: "the first time my character lied" — and the hand doesn't stop.