This can be a huge benefit to you on your journey to learn French in France. Just writing whatever pops into your head can be a fun and creative exercise and you never quite know what complex maze of ideas you might create and what treasures you might find at the end of it. You might end up doing a beautiful piece of French writing that is worthy to show your teachers at the EasyFrench immersion school or it might be a bit of a rag tag mish-mash of ideas that don’t really form a coherent linear progression. In this case however you will have still drawn something from the simple act of doing it as this holds value too. I sometimes get so hung up on what or what not to write, what’s interesting, what’s boring that I spend quite a while uhming and arring over the subject and I find it hard to get going. Simply sitting down however, in front of your notebook or your computer and writing something can have a real unlocking quality.
It’s doesn’t even have to be for the whole piece of whatever it is you’re writing, it can just be the start as often that’s all you need to get going. Just a little buffer zone of splurging out the thoughts that come to mind and you might find you feel out something that is of interest to you. A thought or an observation you made a couple of hours or days ago that you wanted to return to but it just never swung back into your busy mind. A something that can sometimes put people off when they are doing this while learning French in France is the worry that it won’t be very good but I’m here to tell you that isn’t important, what’s more important is that you just START writing.
I find it haunting to think about the amount of time I waste just through struggling to start writing something in French. I almost always find that as soon as I start writing I’m fine and the ideas sort of just float along and lead on from each other like a thread of a jumper. It feels natural and organic and like I have momentum behind me and almost the complete opposite to the clunky uncomfortable start which normally leads to some form of procrastination. Now when I sit down to do some extra work for my intensive French immersion course I simply start by typing anything, any words. Just type something. I love working on my computer so I do my writing on there but others like the feel of their favourite pen in their favourite notebook or the woody feel of a pencil. Whatever feels best for you do that and after a couple minutes of this unformed mental deluge I think you will find something interesting to talk about. This bring me onto another point, pick something that’s interesting to you not what you think will be interesting to other people, it’s you who you have got to entertain first. I heard a comedy writer once say that it’s essential the jokes you write have you in stitches because if they don’t make you laugh they won’t make anyone laugh. It’s tempting to want to try and create nice stories or argue about interesting topics when you are doing extra writing for your French lessons but the first priority is engaging yourself. If you interest yourself you are going to have more to say and that means you can make a more nuanced and complex piece of text.
I have found that after doing this for a couple of weeks I now feel like I could sit down and start writing something at any point. I start with a stream of conscious; as I start to feel my fingers tapping away at the keys I start to get into the rhythm and then once I have found a bit of a flow I start to increase the pace and this starts to send me into a bit of a trance; all other things seem to fade away and I’m no longer distracted by anything, there’s only me and the computer. Then I start to hit on topics that I found interesting or have been thinking more about and before you know it I have completed a short piece ready to give to the teachers at the EasyFrench Immersion School in Montpellier. It has been extremely helpful to me on my intensive French immersion course for adults in France.