From James Elkins's site Lawyer as Writer
Freewriting
Peter Elbow argues that the first and most basic step to improved writing is freewriting. Freewriting means simply that for ten (10) minutes you write without stopping. The idea isn't to produce a polished (or even "good") piece of writing, but to simply get in the habit of writing without censoring and editing. In freewriting, "[n]ever 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." (3). The only rule to follow in freewriting is to simply not stop writing.
Freewriting is a way to break the habit of trying to write and edit at the same time. Freewriting can be a little difficult because it goes against the grain of how we are accustomed to writing. We normally edit as we write, pausing to collect our thoughts, recollect the correct spelling of a word, lining out a sentence that does not belong, rejecting a paragraph that doesn't fit with the argument that we are making, stopping to think ahead to outline in our mind a structure or outline of the argument that we are trying to make. Elbow notes that "[a]lmost everybody interposes a massive and complicated series of editings between the time words start to be born into consciousness and when they finally come off the end of the pencil or typewriter onto the page." (5).
Editing, says Elbow, is not the problem. Reworking and revising writing is difficult enough, the problem arises when we try to rethink, rewrite, and revision at the same time we are getting our initial, fragmentary, raw, unshaped thoughts onto paper. We get "nervous, jumpy, [and] inhibited" when we write because we are trying to draft and edit at the same time. "It's an unnecessary burden to try to think of words and also worry at the same time whether they're the right words." (5). Consequently, it is the regular practice of freewriting (writing without editing) that "undoes the ingrained habit of editing at the same time you are trying to produce." (6).
Elbow recommends that you spend ten minutes each day doing freewriting. "You don't have to think hard or prepare or be in the mood: without stopping, just write whatever words come out--whether or not you are thinking or in the mood." (9).
The freewriting you do will ultimately effect your writing. "Freewritings are vacuums. Gradually you will begin to carry over into your regular writing some of the voice, force, connectedness that creep into those vacuums." (7).
{Quotes are from Elbow's Writing Without Teachers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973}.