automatic writing

American  

noun

1. writing performed without apparent intent or conscious control, especially to achieve spontaneity or uncensored expression.

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Etymology

Origin of automatic writing

First recorded in 1880–85

Example Sentences

Do you get into sort of a flow state or almost, like, automatic writing, where you’re not totally aware of what you’re even doing?

From Los Angeles Times • Jun. 5, 2025

What began five decades ago as a few folders of slides and fliers has grown into an apartment-filling archive encompassing color theory, UFOs, automatic writing and more.

From New York Times • May 16, 2024

I like to quote French writer André Breton, who invented automatic writing.

From Scientific American • Oct. 6, 2023

This is not a new project—one could trace it to the early twentieth-century Surrealist tradition of automatic writing, or perhaps even further.

From The New Yorker • Nov. 29, 2018

Stowe later claimed to have written as if in a trance, similar to the Spiritualists’ automatic writing: “I did not write it … God wrote it … I merely did his dictation.”

From "American Spirits" by Barb Rosenstock