KristyWes

Dates and Pages

"My only ritual for writing is that I do it every morning. I wake up and get to work. If I’m in a motel in Mobile—so be it. If I am up all night, and morning is two o’clock in the afternoon, well, that’s okay too. The only thing that matters is that you write, write, write. It doesn’t have to be good writing. As a matter of fact, almost all first drafts are pretty bad. What matters is that you get down the words on the page or the screen..."

-Walter Mosley, from his book This Year You Write Your Novel

Came across this quote recently. It pretty much sums up my last post on writing, which pretty much just summed up the writing instructions of Stephen King and Anne Lamott, which is to say, the Nike approach to the craft: Just Do It. For a lazy procrastinator like me, this approach does not have quite the appeal of perhaps a "Just Think About It" approach. But the experts have spoken.

Anyhow. A friend recently introduced me to The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. We've been working through the book (it's broken into 12 week-long segments, with readings and assignments for you to complete each week.) The idea is to unblock your creativity and recover your inner artist. Or something. It may sound hokey, or self-helpy, but actually it's been interesting & helpful.

Cameron recommends (well, insists, really) that you take up two regular practices during your journey into unblocked creativity. One practice she terms "artist dates," which entail taking your little artist-self on a weekly date to some activity or place or space that will encourage you to start observing and sensing and experiencing. The end goal being that, from these experiences of life, art, and yourself, you become inspired to create. I had planned to take myself on a date to the Met last weekend, but I stood myself up. Perhaps this weekend...

I've been doing a little better with the second practice, "morning pages." Essentially this is just journaling; Cameron asks her readers to commit to writing 3 journal pages each morning. The content of the pages doesn't need to be profound - it should just be whatever is in your head and needs to come out (aka a "brain dump.") If you can't think of anything to write, you should write, "I can't think of anything to write" over and over until something else comes out.

I have been journaling for years, but I'm pretty sporadic at best. Mainly I journal out of necessity, when at a crossroads or crisis. Occassionally I journal when I need to pray, but am worried that I'll fall asleep if I just sit there praying quietly with my eyes closed. I put myself to much shame recently when I realized that it had taken me *2* years to fill out my latest journal. And it was not a thick book, people! No excuse for such spotty, sparse writing.

Armed with a pretty new journal (I really think it's the prettiest journal in the world and it makes me so happy just looking at it. "Here's looking at you, kid!" I tell it.) (No, I don't.) and the no-pressure approach of Cameron's daily "morning pages," I've been doing pretty well with this practice lately. I think that's a step in the write direction. (Oh no, I didn't just make that pun!) (Yes, I did.)