I love Peter Elbow’s ideas about composing and writing. It’s as if he took some of my ideas, stole them right out of my brain, and put them down on paper in Writing With Power. "Freewriting," an exercise he describes in the book, is something I’ve seen at online communities I’m part of. When I recently joined a new group, Newsvine, I asked if there was interest in the activity there. We are now in our 12th week. Yes, the student has become the teacher.

I’ve watched as the exercise has helped budding writers. Elbow sums up the problem nicely: “Sometimes, in fact, when people think too much during the early stages about what they want to end up with, that preoccupation with the final product keeps them from attaining it.”

Natalie Goldberg calls a very similar exercise “Writing Down the Bones” in her book Writing Down the Bones. She says: “The idea is to keep your hand moving for, say, ten minutes, and don’t cross anything out, because that makes space for our inner editor to come in.”

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