![](\"https:\/\/world.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/A-writing-without-fear-game-1.png\")
<\/p>\n\n<\/p>\n
Doctoral researchers sometimes suffer from\u00a0\u00a0lack of confidence about their writing. They can construct a sentence, a paragraph and a whole chapter. But they have difficulty when they imagine a supervisor, a reviewer, or an examiner reading over their shoulder as they type. Every clause gets checked against an invisible judge before it\u2019s finished, and half of what gets written is erased, immediately. And what\u2019s left is softened into something safe and forgettable.<\/p>\n
Here is a game that attends to writing confidence. It\u2019s not about grammar or argument. It\u2019s more about desensitising yourself to the fact that someone other than you is going to read what you wrote. The game is designed for a retreat or workshop session.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s how it goes. Writers work in pairs. Each round starts with a prompt card, which gives a genre-breaking instruction. Not \u201cwrite about your methodology\u201d or \u201cwrite an outline\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0The prompt cards are designed to force your material into an unfamiliar shape. There are sample prompt cards at the end of these instructions.<\/p>\n
A timer runs for two minutes, no more. After each two minute round, partners read a single line aloud, chosen by the writer. Choose something you want to say out loud. This may not be the strongest line nor the weakest, just\u00a0\u00a0something you feel OK about saying out loud.<\/p>\n
The partner\u2019s only job is to say what image or idea came to them. No feedback on quality, no suggestions. Nothing that sounds like Reviewer 2. The moment feedback creeps back in, everyone reverts to writing for the judge again.<\/p>\n
And then comes the interesting part: whatever gets written in those two minutes is discarded. It cannot be kept, shown to anyone beyond the immediate partner, or used later in the actual thesis or paper. It exists for two minutes and then it\u2019s gone.<\/p>\n
This discard rule is the point. Once a piece of writing has no future and no reader beyond the room, people stop editing themselves mid-sentence, tidying the words before anyone sees. The writing is just about responding to the prompt.<\/p>\n
Play six to eight rounds in a session. In the earlier rounds, keep the prompts playful and clearly detached from the real writing, so the discard feels safe. You\u2019re not losing anything important. By the later rounds, you can shift the prompts towards the actual material from the your current writing, but still under the same two-minute limit and the same discard rule.<\/p>\n
But by then you have begun to build up enough throwaway repetitions that writing kinda-badly-on-purpose no longer feels dangerous\u2026 and you may start to generate some ideas for the real writing. The experience of writing without consequences may also help with that confidence issue.<\/p>\n
None of this makes you a better writer in an afternoon. What it gives you is some evidence that you can write without always thinking ahead of yourself \u2013 and some practice in writing without fear.<\/p>\n
Prompt cards<\/strong><\/p>\n Here are some sample prompt cards grouped by what they\u2019re trying to loosen up.<\/p>\n Cards that change the imagined reader:<\/strong><\/p>\n Cards that change the register:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n