Freewriting is like Sourdough
A writing habit allows room to develop character in your voice
Using a recipe allows you to skip most mistakes. Personally, I return to King Arthur’s Naturally Leavened Sourdough Bread. After years of baking, I still haven't mastered it. It comes out too flat or too hard or the wrong color…
My first round, yeah, I’m going to bake bread badly. But flour and water are cheap. I can learn from it and make a second loaf. And a third loaf. I can try a different recipe and find joy in applying what I’ve learned from my other loaves.
It’s a process. You’re going to make a lot of shitty sourdough before you make a good one. Writing is the same way.
This switch in accepting failure as a process in baking permeates my writing efforts. Like the flour and water, individual words are cheap. I pour them onto the page because something is better to work with than nothing. I knead sentences and massage paragraphs. Sprinkle in a few more adjectives, go light on the adverbs. When I was an amateur, I would immediately throw my writing into the oven, publishing without a thought.
With more writing projects came experience. I treat my writing like sourdough now. The first draft is like a sourdough starter, containing a flour-and-water slurry. Tiny living organisms, yeast and lactobacilli, thrive in the starter. These friendly bacteria make a byproduct that causes bread to rise and creates the complex, rich flavor characteristic of sourdough. The key is allowing the starter to rest and feeding the bacteria consistently.
Sourdough takes a delicate balance of an even weight of flour and water, typically 113 grams of each. After 24 hours (or perhaps longer if you store the starter in the fridge), you feed the starter again by discarding half of the starter and adding amounts of flour and water equal to what remains. Let the sourdough rest for at least 24 hours, then repeat. The discarded amount can be used to bake. When you feed the starter, you’re feeding the bacteria.
If you throw off the feeding proportions of flour, water, and starter, you may dilute the bacteria’s environment and make it difficult to produce essential bread byproducts. All hope is not lost! Most starters can be revived with regular feeding, even after a year of neglect.
Feel like a sourdough savant now? Let’s get back to writing. Like the dough, freewriting regularly allows my skills to develop and deepen. It helps me develop my characteristic voice. However, writing constantly is not the same as writing consistently. Taking time away from writing allows you—your own living organism—to replenish with the world around you. It helps you generate new ideas, find sources, and other inspirations. It’s a delicate balance, though, because, at some point, you must return to writing.
Sometimes, I let my writing rest for a few hours. Other times, I place it into an ideas journal and let it sit for weeks. Just like sourdough, it doesn’t really go bad. I’ll revisit the concept every once in a while and provide a few more thoughts for nourishment. When it comes time to publish, I select what I want—like taking the discard out—and leave the rest of the writing for the next project.
In 1995, Annie Lamott advocated a similar concept in writing, encouraging authors to embrace their shitty first draft: “Start by getting something—anything down on paper,” she wrote in Bird by Bird. “The first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up.”
My new goal is to complete four drafts before handing it to an editor. Sometimes, that’s feasible. I can dump everything down, then fix it up in a second version, return to feed the draft a third time, and prepare for the final bake the fourth time. Other times, I’m in a hurry and need to share after a second draft. My time at Johns Hopkins taught me that I need to regularly feed and nourish my free writing to create the complex, rich flavors in my published writing.