Free Writing - this is an exercise I employ quite often to see what is lurking beneath the surface! I recommend it to anyone with writer’s block, anyone who wants to unlock some creative space with words and download their subconscious.

For those who haven’t tried this before, you pick a starting word/theme, and then write non-stop as fast as you can for two minutes/until you fill the page/until you get cramp in your hand!

You’re not allowed to think about what you are writing, and you can’t stop, go back, edit, correct spelling. Just keep writing. You’ll be amazed at what comes out.

This is one recent one, based on Hot Air Balloons:

Hot air balloon will take you up and away and change your perspective on everything.
You will see the clouds and they will rest on you and eat your nose and you’ll giggle with Mary Poppins and her neverending bag of stuff.
From up there you’ll forget who you are and if you fall well it would be a good experiment.
All the things that you could think in those few seconds before you die: has your brain ever worked so fast.
As lightning.
Like the lightning that struck the balloon and made you fall, and the clouds that ate your nose.
And the cow that composed.
Wow, this is free writing huh?
A composing cow, a marauding sheep, a pig with a fiddle and mouse with a machine gun.
Sounds like monty python.
But they all hate each other, but my musical animals get along just fine.