Free-writing is, most often, how we honor an impulse to write, during which that impulse either catches fire or peters out. Many writers know this, but few approach free-writing as a practice, one with a wide range of methods and purposes. There are, in other words, as many ways to fill a blank page as there are to dance, but it’s easy to get stuck doing the Frat Boy Two-Step, repeating the same habitual patterns, regardless of the subject. This course, which originated at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and has since been taught around the country, presents a corpus of innovative techniques and approaches to help us make discoveries on the page, while generating a bounty of new material. Writers come away with a broader range of subjects and styles, more fluidity and confidence, and ways to stay productive on their own.

Each day of this workshop will introduce participants to a different approach to filling a page, each with a skill set we can practice and begin to acquire. Our motto for practicing in this way will be “Give yourself permission to suck.” There will be no pressure to write well, no pressure to share what you write, and we will not be critiquing. There will be the opposite of pressure; a spirit of play will be encouraged as the best way to learn technique. (Our secret motto will be “The permission to suck is also the permission to be brilliant.”)

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.