Free Writing Journaling: How To Start And Keep Going

Free writing journaling has one rule, and every page that ranks for it paraphrases the rule without saying where it came from. Write for a set time and don't stop. That's the whole method, and it was set down in 1973 by Peter Elbow in the first chapter of Writing Without Teachers, at ten minutes, at least three times a week, with exact instructions for what to do when your hand stops.

So here's the short version. Tonight, ten minutes, a timer, and the pen doesn't leave the page. If you can't think of anything, write "I can't think what to say" until you can, which is Elbow's instruction and not a joke. Keep going means three sessions a week for four weeks, two hours in total, and then a decision. Below is the difference between Elbow's ten minutes and Julia Cameron's three morning pages, which the ranking pages blend into one paragraph. Then a stall ladder, what ten minutes comes to in words, and the honest note that free writing has no wellbeing trial behind it that I could find. That's fine. It isn't claiming to be one.

What The Explainers Leave Out

I read the four text pages on the first page of results properly. None of them shows a freewrite.

The ultimate guide is the most complete and it's the one I'd read after this. It gets the rule right and gives a timer. But it treats "10 to 15 minutes" and "three pages" as interchangeable, and they're different practices with different price tags, which is the next section. The Yoga Journal piece is a nice essay about perfectionism with two therapists quoted and no instructions. The coach's post and the free-versus-structured page both sell something at the bottom.

The gap is the stall. Every page tells you not to stop. None of them tells you what to write in the second when you already have.

The Two Texts That Define It

There are two lineages, and the reason to separate them is cost.

The first is Elbow's chapter, which UC Santa Barbara's research office hosts as an excerpt. "The idea is simply to write for ten minutes (later on, perhaps fifteen or twenty). Don't stop for anything. Go quickly without rushing. Never stop to look back, to cross something out, to wonder how to spell something, to wonder what word or thought to use, or to think about what you are doing." He calls them, with some affection, "automatic writing," "babbling," or "jabbering" exercises, and he wants them at least three times a week. What matters is what happens afterward. "It must be a piece of writing which, even if someone else reads it, doesn't send any ripples back to you. It is like writing something and putting it in a bottle in the sea." The exercise is built to be thrown away.

The second is Cameron's. Her site states it in capitals. "Morning pages are three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness morning writing about absolutely anything." The unit is pages, the hour is fixed, and the medium is fixed. It's one of four "bedrock tools" in her programme, alongside a weekly solo outing, two twenty-minute walks and a question-and-answer practice, and the book it comes from has sold over six million copies by her count. The old public page for the tool now redirects into a course lesson, so the one sentence on the homepage is what's left in the open.

The ranking pages pick the shorter unit from one and the fixed hour from the other and call the result free writing. I'd pick one text and do what it says. For someone starting, that's Elbow, because ten minutes is a promise you can keep on a Wednesday. If it's the morning slot that appeals and the hour isn't there, the five-minute morning entry on this site is a different tool built for exactly that gap.

What A Freewrite Looks Like On The Page

The question people also ask under this search is for an example, and it's the right question, because the finished thing looks nothing like a journal entry.

Elbow prints one in the chapter and introduces it as "a fairly coherent exercise (sometimes they are very incoherent, which is fine)." It starts like this, with his double hyphens turned into full stops. "I think I'll write what's on my mind, but the only thing on my mind right now is what to write for ten minutes. I've never done this before and I'm not prepared in any way. The sky is cloudy today, how's that?" A few lines on it's noticed the room. "This is kind of fun oh don't stop writing. Cars and trucks speeding by somewhere out the window, pens clittering across peoples' papers." It ends on a list of colours and the words "just about done. Relief? maybe."

That's what it's supposed to look like. Half of it is the writer complaining about the exercise, and that's allowed.

Here's a second one, which I wrote for this page to show the shape rather than pulled from any notebook, and which is deliberately dull. "Ten minutes and the kettle's going. I was going to write about the email but now I'm writing about the kettle which is louder than it should be and there's a chip in the mug I keep using anyway. The email. Can't think what to say can't think what to say. The email is about the invoice and the reason I haven't sent it is the line about the deadline which I'd rather not put in writing and now I've put it in writing so. Kettle's off. Hand hurts a bit already which means I'm gripping. Window. The neighbour's light is on. Deadline deadline deadline I'll take the line out and send it plain." That's about 115 words. It reads in half a minute and takes a hand seven to ten minutes to write, at the rate worked out two sections down.

Notice what both do. They don't stay on topic. They record the room when the thought runs out. They repeat. And the second one arrives, by accident, at a decision it wouldn't have reached by thinking about the email for the same ten minutes.

The Stall Ladder

Elbow gives three moves for the moment the hand stops, in this order, and I've added two beneath them.

1. A squiggle. "If you can't think of a word or a spelling, just use a squiggle." The line keeps moving and the gap is marked.
2. The refrain. Write "I can't think what to say, I can't think what to say" as many times as you want. His wording exactly, and it works because it's boring, so the mind gives you something else to escape it.
3. The last word. "Repeat the last word you wrote over and over again." Same principle. Deadline deadline deadline.
4. The room. Mine. Write what's in front of you, the light, the mug, the sound, until the thought comes back. Both examples above did this on their own, which suggests it's the natural move anyway.
5. A stem. Mine, borrowed from the starters page on this site. An unfinished sentence such as "the thing about today is" can't be answered with a blank, so it restarts the hand.

The order matters. Reach for one before four, because the whole exercise is about not stopping to decide, and choosing a stem is a decision. The squiggle and the refrain need no thought at all, which is why they're first.

How Long Ten Minutes Is In Words

Nobody ranking for this says how many words a freewrite is, which is the number a beginner actually wants, because a page that's mostly white feels like failure.

Here's my working, with its limits attached. The nearest normative handwriting data I could find today is a 2011 study of 120 healthy Australians, and its youngest group, people in their sixties, copied text at about 113 letters a minute. The same study found self-generated text came out slower than copying, without giving the figure in the abstract. Counting a word as five letters plus a space, which is close to the convention typing research uses, 113 letters is about 19 words a minute copying. My assumption for fresh handwriting at a kitchen table is 12 to 18 words a minute, and I'll say plainly that's an assumption, informed by that copying number and the slowdown for composing.

So ten minutes is roughly 120 to 180 words. Half a page of a lined A5 notebook, maybe two-thirds. That's the whole exercise, and it's supposed to look small.

Three pages is a different bill. A lined A5 page holds something like 150 to 200 handwritten words in my estimate, so three pages is 450 to 600 words, and at 12 to 18 a minute that's 25 to 50 minutes. A commenter on the free-versus-structured page reports 45 minutes, which lands inside that range. Every morning, that's three to six hours a week, which is the number to know before you commit to Cameron's version rather than Elbow's.

Paper Or Keyboard

The rule is that you can't go back. Paper enforces it. A keyboard has a backspace key, and the only fix I know is to turn the brightness down until you can't see what you've typed.

There's one honest wrinkle. In one study that timed the two modes while people composed, a 2017 paper on schoolchildren writing personal narratives, the keyboard produced more words and more words a minute, and the pen produced longer runs of language between pauses. Those were children in grades four to nine, so I'd take the direction and leave the size. University students in a 2022 study of 1,301 typists copied sentences at 54 words a minute in the slowest third and 80 in the fastest, three or four times the handwriting figure above. A typed ten minutes is a lot more words. Whether it's a better freewrite, nobody's measured.

For what the writing does to you, as opposed to how much of it there is, the meta-analysis this site keeps coming back to found no meaningful difference between handwriting and typing, and the starting guide has that table and a privacy column beside it. My own lean is paper for this one exercise, because the backspace is the enemy and the pen doesn't have one.

Keeping Going For Four Weeks

Elbow's frequency, three times a week, is the plan, and four weeks is the length because it's long enough to notice anything and short enough to actually finish. Twelve sessions. Two hours in total.

Three rules for the twelve.

Don't reread. The bottle goes in the sea. If you want to reread, do it once, on the last day, and only the last three sessions. The exercise is training the hand to run ahead of the editor, and rereading invites the editor back in.

Don't upgrade the timer until week three. Elbow says fifteen or twenty "later on," and later on means after the ten-minute habit is boring, which is a good sign rather than a bad one.

Don't set a topic. This is where free writing parts company with the prompt library on this site, and with the timed protocols on the how to journal page, where the instruction names the subject and the sessions have a purpose measured in a trial. A freewrite that starts with a prompt is a prompted entry written fast. That's fine, it's just a different thing.

At the end of the four weeks, the decision. If the sessions got easier and the stall ladder got shorter, keep the three a week, or move to Cameron's pages if mornings are open and you can afford the hour. If nothing changed, you've spent two hours and learned that this particular tool isn't yours, which is cheaper than most things a notebook site will sell you.

What The Evidence Actually Says

I looked, and the honest answer is that free writing as a wellbeing practice hasn't been trialled. A title search of the Europe PMC database for freewriting, free writing and morning pages returned six records today, and the only one about the practice is a 2026 study of trainee teachers in a seven-week university writing workshop, which reported better self-regulation, better attitudes toward writing, and, in the interviews, less writing-related anxiety. That's an education result and I'd read it as one.

The writing exercises with trials behind them are a different animal. They're timed, they name the subject, and they're on the how to journal page with their session counts. Elbow's chapter doesn't claim the exercise will improve your mood. It claims it will undo the habit of editing while you produce, and he wrote that "trying to get the beginning just right is a formula for failure." That's a claim about writing, and it's the one this page is making too.

The Questions Under This Search

What is the difference between freewriting and journaling? Freewriting is a rule about editing. Journaling is a container. You can freewrite in a journal and you can journal without ever freewriting. The reddit thread at the top of these results asks whether free writing needs its own notebook, and I'd say no, because a page you're going to throw away can live anywhere.

Can you give me an example of freewriting? Two are above, Elbow's and one written for this page. The tell is that both spend part of the time describing the room.

What is a good free journal writing app? The requirement is that you can't go back, and most apps make going back the easiest thing on the screen, so the honest answer is whichever plain text app you already own, with the brightness down. The starting guide compares paper, notes apps, voice memos and desktop files on privacy and reach.

What are the 7 different types of journaling? My sort, and other people's differ. A log, a list, a gratitude page, a prompted entry, a planner, a sketchbook and a letter book. Freewriting isn't one of the seven. It's a speed you can do any of them at, though it suits the log and the letter best.

What is the 3-3-3 journaling method, and the 3-2-1 method? Page templates, three of this and three of that, defined on the starting guide. They're the opposite of free writing, since every line has an assignment.

What I'd Do Tonight

Ten minutes, timer on, the mug in front of you. Start with whatever's on your mind, and if that's nothing, start with the mug. When the hand stops, squiggle, then the refrain, then the last word. Stop when the timer goes, mid-sentence if that's where it lands, and close the notebook without reading it.

Then do it again Wednesday. I keep a lot of projects in one place, and my honest read of my own notes is that the useful ones were written too fast to be careful. That's the case for this, and it's the only one I'll make.