The braindump hour
Don't forget it's Heartleap Writing Hour at 9am
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about.” Natalie Goldberg
Is your head just too full sometimes? Mine is.
Half-finished thoughts, low-level worries, ideas that won’t sit still, conversations you’re replaying, things you should be doing, things you don’t want to do at all. It all swirls around until you can’t quite hear yourself think and I just want to lie down in a darkened room.
This is where the Braindump Hour comes in.
This is the hour where you don’t have to be coherent, clever or even grammatical. You don’t have to finish a sentence. You don’t have to make a point. You just get it out. Stream of consciousness. Messy, unfiltered, occasionally dramatic.
Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way calls them the morning pages and suggests we write three a4 pages a day before we get out of bed, Tanya Lynch suggests we ‘rage on the page.’
I sometimes call it “vomit on the page” which doesn’t sound that lovely but I find is deeply effective. You are not writing for anyone, you are writing to yourself. You are telling yourself the truth of what’s in your head, without editing or analysing or trying to make it palatable. Let it be raw, honest and unreasonable if it needs to be.
The point is not to solve anything. It is to clear space.
Once it’s on the page, it’s no longer circling in your head like a wasp at a picnic. You can come back to it later, sort it, shape it, make sense of it. But first, you have to let it out.
So today, let’s give ourselves permission to take a Braindump Hour and let it all spill out.
Prompt
Write without stopping or editing, using any of these to get you started:
How do I feel right now?
What is making me happy?
What is making me miserable?
What do I want to run away from?
What do I want to run towards?
What is surprising me?
What idea won’t leave me alone?
What might I do with it?
Want to create a writing practice in 2026? Come join us at Heart Leap.
If you’ve been meaning to write — your journal, your Substack, your book, your Big Beautiful Thing — but somehow always end up reorganising the fridge instead… welcome home.
At Heart Leap, I host four writing hours a week Monday to Thursday from 9–10am GMT. We chat for five minutes at the start, five at the end, and the rest of the time we simply write together. No pressure or performance, just a calm, friendly corner of the internet where pages get filled and ideas stop hiding.
If you need accountability, a regular rhythm, or a space where other writers are also muttering “why is this so hard?”, you’ll be in excellent company.
We also have a Writing Rehab class on the first Wednesday of the month and we run the 12 week Artist’s Way once a year.
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