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

I’ve been making these minimal newsprint collages for quite a few years now, and I did it mostly for a kind of solitary escape, a form of automatic writing, but with reappropriating visual things.

From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 28, 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

Her golden square from 1916 is placed alongside a similar image by Josef Albers from 1971; her automatic writing doodles from 1896 are pitted against Cy Twombly’s 1967 squiggles.

From The Guardian • Oct. 6, 2020

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