Looping is an extended version of freewriting in which you begin with an initial five-minute freewrite on a general topic, then select out of that bit of writing the sentence or idea that interests you the most. You then use that sentence or idea as the basis for your next five-minute round of freewriting. You continue this process of elaborating informally on specific ideas until you come to a point where your topic seems sufficiently narrow, researchable, and appropriate to your writing assignment.
Example of Looping
If I am freewriting on the general (and overly broad) topic of "development of small towns in the Rocky Mountain region," I might start with the following initial ideas:
Problem: Development of Small Towns in the Rocky Mountain Region
When I grew up in Anyoldtown, New Mexico, it was a small town in the smallest sense:
no movie theaters, no supermarkets, nothing. We had to go into town for the things
we needed. Land sold for $2000 an acre. Now it sells for about $50,000 an acre.
Anyoldtown was also primarily hispanic, and the families who lived there had very
little. Now the people who live there are mostly white and almost exclusively
professionals: doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and an endless number of people
who have money that seems to have come from nowhere. There are good things
to be had there now: good restaurants, good coffee, and all the other things that
come along with Yuppie invasion. But those things were had at quite a cost. People
who used to live in Anyoldtown when I was a kid can no longer afford to pay
property taxes. I can't think of anything else to write now. Oh, yes...these people
made a killing off the sale of their land and properties, but they had to give up the
places they had lived all their lives. However, by the time they sold, Anyoldtown
was no longer the place where they had lived all their lives anyway.
Rereading what I have written, I might decide that what interests me the most and seems
most appropriate to the writing assignment I have been given is my idea about the property
tax dilemma. With this in mind, I would write a second "loop" on this area of my thinking,
perhaps even starting my freewriting with the exact sentence I used in the first "loop:"
People who used to live in Anyoldtown when I was a kid can no longer afford
to pay property taxes. This is unfair, because these people spent their entire
lives in this town, and land was all they had. Theoretically, the Yuppie Invasion
doesn't drive out the "townies" or "natives" of a small town, but in actuality,
land values and property taxes (as well as cultural influences, of course) make it
impossible (and oftentimes undesirable) for people to hold onto their own land.
People have to sell, because if they don't, they can no longer afford to maintain
the standard of living that their town has taken on (in more ways than one).
This issue obviously has class implications, but I'm sure it also relates to cultural
(ethnic) issues as well. This is where I would need to begin researching, if I wanted
to see who was most negatively affected by rising property taxes and land values.
In rereading this second loop, I might decide that my ideas toward the end of the paragraph
interest me the most. I could write another loop expanding these specific ideas on race,
class, and property taxes, or I might decide that I have (as my freewrite suggests)
arrived at the point where I need to begin researching.