get a poetry geeks I'm Jackson and you are watching the poetry show and in today's poetry show we are going to be talking about a method that will help you generate excellent ideas for your poetry so in this poetry show I wanted to talk to you briefly about the idea of free writing now free writing is usually a technique that is used as a prewriting technique for prose writers so when we talk about prose would basically just mean every type of writing essentially there isn't poetry so novels nonfiction that kind of thing and prose writers will use this time to generate their ideas and just kind of overcome writer's block or mental obstacles that kind of thing but it can be very useful for poets as well and sometimes for slightly different reasons so I think it's a pretty good method that you can use to generate ideas for your poems the the basic gist of it is to write unhindered for a set period of time so you just write continuously without interruption and if you feel yourself running out of steam then you just change topic or you start trying to describe why you feel like you've run out of things to say about the thing you're writing about but the idea is you just try and write continuously for a set amount of time and you can determine how long that set of time is you don't want to care too much about the quality of what you write because the point isn't you're gonna go back and very very heavily edited so don't worry if you think that what you're writing is terrible because it is almost guaranteed to be terrible because you're not putting really any thought into it you're just using it to generate thought which is a very different thing so you might find while you're writing that what you write is riddled with cliches mine usually is and that's not a problem you can go back and read it afterwards and try and figure out what it was that you were trying to describe and come up with a fresh perspective on it in a fresh way of explaining that so don't get as I said don't get too hung up on the quality the really great thing about free writing is it allows your thoughts to flow freely like a conversation and not to get too hung up on necessarily the logic of what you're trying to say sometimes it can just kind of come out quite freely you can find yourself having quite interesting those conversations with people without having to plan in advance what it was you were going to say and you'll find if you trust your brain to make those kinds of connections on the fly then you can do that in your writing just as easily as you can in conversation and the other great thing about this as a method is it allows you to make some connections between words and phrases and ideas that you wouldn't necessarily always have made simply because you're being forced to write continuously so because you're under some sort of personal obligation to keep on writing and keep on connecting ideas and keep on generating ideas you may find that there's some sort of subconscious magic that's happening that allows you to kind of tap into some connections and you weren't previously consciously aware of that you thought were there but aren't nevertheless quite valid in your poetry the only real difficulty in free writing is overcoming that initial inhibition the initial feeling that what you're writing is going to suck and look it will suck and that's okay all you really have to do is keep on trying at it and keep on practicing and you will get better over time so how do you do it well as the name suggests there there shouldn't be too many rules put in place on your free writing you should be completely free now usually it's suggested as a kind of daily writing practice method where you write freely about anything at all some people get up first thing they do is maybe write 200 words or they write for 30 minutes or you know they set themselves some arbitrary goal and they just keep on writing until they've met that goal and they didn't have a topic in mind now for a poet it might make sense for you to have a topic in mind or a subject at least so you might start with your subject in mind and then determine how long you're going to spend writing about it if you're only starting out you might start for something small like five minutes and then you might build up to 10 15 20 as you get better at it and as you start to trust the process a little bit more as well so once you've put your subject and you set your timer you put yourself somewhere where you can't be interrupted where you're not going to be checking Twitter you're not going to be looking for facebook notifications or that kind of thing and you write continuously for that set amount of time you don't have to write quickly you just want to write continuously it's not a race you're not trying to generate more and more and more each day all you're trying to do is keep on producing content and that can be quite slow but as long as it's continuous as long as you don't find yourself stopping and thinking and trying to come up with a better expression the idea is to just let the poor expression stand for itself and you can always go back and fix it later it's really important that you don't get hung up on spelling punctuation and grammar and if what you're writing is riddled with errors that's not a problem at this stage like I said you can go back and edit but you do want to try and write in a sensible way so writing in either complete sentences or more or less complete sentences or at least in phrases that are intelligible to you you can if that's not your style of poetry that's fine you can Whittle that stuff away afterwards but you want to try and retain as much of the kind of complete thinking process that you initially had so you want to try and write in full sentences you want to try and write incomplete phrases and then if you want to whittle away at that afterwards in the editing then that's something you're obviously free to do and the golden rule for free writing is not to worry about quality I've already said this but it bears repeating nine-tenths of good writing and particularly a poetry comes in the editing and the re-editing and the drafting and the redrafting you want to be able to generate a lot of ideas and a lot of content but when you actually come to writing a poem you want to try and say it with as much brevity and as much clarity as possible and you might find that a lot of the kind of superfluous language that you have just serves to undermine the poem that you're writing and a pirate I talked about not that long ago Ally copy Eckerman one of the things she's really great at he's having this almost quite sparse language sometimes really incisive imagery and it's one of the things that makes her a really great poet I think among other things and so be aware that a lot of what you do will be and almost like pruning and a rose bush back so that you know something amazing can grow from it and as with pruning roses you often have to prune away a little bit more than you're comfortable pruning so what I'm saying is let it be terrible to begin with and go back and edit it and it will slowly become a better piece of writing and we're not going to talk about the editing today I just wanted to come to leave you with that idea of free writing to begin with in a couple of weeks we'll talk about particularly turning free writing into and a better poem but in the intervening weeks we'll talk about some more kind of techniques and things like that as well I hope you've enjoyed this video and I hope you found it helpful if you have found it helpful and then please do like and subscribe to the channel and as always if there are particular poems that you want me to look at in a little bit more detail on the kind of analysis side of things then either leave me a comment or you know tweet at me and I will do my best to lie on that one for you so thanks for watching and I will see you next time