I (re-)discovered free writing lately. Having heard about it a long time ago, I had never picked it up. Sitting down and starting to write is not easy.
What caught my eye this time is an app literally called freewrite, which I saw on X (perhaps more about X later).
White canvas, black characters, minimal settings, all local, and from a builder that I admire, those are enough for me to start trying.
My recent schedule doesn’t allow me to write. Busy at work with a lot of travel.
And I blame Claude too, since free time that used to be spent on other stuff - including writing - now goes to prompting and building new stuff, which is cool but also takes a lot of my time and drains my energy.
freewrite reminds me of what pushed me to write at the beginning.
I’m a reading, not a diary writing, guy, so it’s gonna be lying to say writing has always been my thing.
Some of my early blog posts get a lot of attention (even until now), which got me recognized at school, and sometimes I receive thank-you notes from readers.
But that was not the reason why I started writing - not to be seen as a guy who writes cool things or to be famous.
I write because I want to keep a snapshot of my thoughts so that I can go back to see how much I have changed.
I talked about books with my colleagues a few days ago, and I showed them my “top 10 books” list for the last 3 years. Some of the books in the 2023 list would not make it for the 2025 list. But that’s the point. If I had not written them down, I would not have known how much I have changed.
I’m going through a period with lots of change in life. Things move fast, and lots of thoughts come to my mind. Some things that are trivial today won’t make sense when I look back in 5 or 10 years, and vice versa, and I want to capture them.
The decisions I make can be trivially good or bad in hindsight, but all are most likely the best option given the situation I’m in, along with the knowledge and information I have.
Writing them down is a way for my future self to empathize with my current self.
I will try this out for a while and see how it goes, both in public and private.
See you in my next free write!