Free Fall writing and Free writing
I found two good life skills: Free Fall writing and Free Write. FF is offered as a drop-in on Fridays, 10 a.m. to noon at the Alexandra Writers Centre Society. (Also offered on-line at the same time)
Free Fall was famously developed by novelist W.O. Mitchell during his teaching at the Banff School of the Arts. When I started FF writing, only 15 years ago, there was little on the web about how. Now the “falling without a parachute” technique has exploded on the internet, become commercialized even, with various workshops and teachers and books and courses. Such a lot, but never mind: here’s a good enough link for the curious: https://writescape.ca/site/tag/freefall-writing/
At the drop-in sessions we are given a prompt of a word or picture, then we scribble as fast as we can, to a timer, with no going back and revising. Then we may read aloud what we just wrote, without being criticized, since we were here to “do,” not “learn,” not like with our hobby-writing at home. I started to bring a lap top because I couldn’t read my own printing. Being a group made up of writers, of no specific variety, we could try fiction, nonfiction, essays, rants, scripts and poetry. Writing into the page, we would often switch topics or genres as we wrote merrily along.
I remember being jealous of how someone else could do dialogue. So I started role modelling, like some Zen “inner game,” whipping off dialogue each week. Gradually I “got it.” Free Fall was “…splendid for my self-confidence,” I said, “because at home I only write essays.” It “wasn’t cricket” to write as we might at home, slowly, carefully, polishing as we go. It naturally followed that we wouldn’t give each other any criticism for improving our craft, beyond “Hey, I liked that part…”
Those who can’t attend the drop-in, might prefer a related skill: Free Writing.
Currently, I am taking an AWCS (noncredit) course, on essays. If our teacher, Richard Harrison, asks us to e-mail to him about, say, our experience with writing, then we might need a long letter. To our surprise, he writes back at length. How does he have time? Easy: he told us he had learned to do “free writing,” which sounded similar to the Free Fall writing that freed me up to write long personal e-mails without getting lost or stuck.
Free Writing is like Free Fall, but Richard uses it differently. At the start of each class, Richard has us “free write,” (without a prompt) —not about our “writing” but about where we “are at.” Then each person reads aloud, but only if they want to, so we can share what words we pick up on in what’’s read to us. Because “noticing” is a skill that can help us read essays.
Next week will discuss our recommended book, Linguaphile, by Calgary scholar Julie Sedivy, about linguistics. Not a textbook, as this is not school, but it will help us to “notice” more things than we might otherwise. I guess it’s a love letter to language, and like any love letter it is more right brain than left brain. (Personal Note: if you plan and organize your love letter to your sweetheart, then you are an idiot)
But that’s not until next week. In today’s class I was concerned about how hard it was going be to remember anything from Linguaphile for discussing. I said, “It’s a right brain book, there’s (metaphorically) no list of points at the end of each chapter.” Richard “got it.” He replied that what he did for books was to free write at the end of the chapter what he had noticed (learned). Everyone brightened like a Christmas bulb. I spoke for all of us when I said, “Wow, we would never have thought of that on our own!”
My dutiful schoolboy “conclusion”: Thanks to Free Fall, I can do long personal e-mails without getting stuck, and today I learned to Free Write what I learn from difficult books: I can hardly wait to try it out.
My real conclusion: Yippee, life is good!
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Sean Crawford
May, 2026
Footnote: Today I invite visitors to my blog to “method act” being writers, just as romantic Canadians visiting London may “try out” being British.
