8.17.14

Good afternoon. The other day at the dentists' office I overheard a woman talking to the receptionist. She was a novelist of some stripe or other (the trouble with overhearing/eavesdropping is that you can't ask clarifying questions) and had completely flummoxed the receptionist when she told her there was no such thing as writer's block. The receptionist had asked her the classic question "what do you do when you're not feeling inspired?" and the novelist told her about the myth of inspiration and the discipline required to make a job of it.

While inspiration is definitely a real thing (as is writer's block), I didn't really want to write about that, since it seems to have been done to death, and in my cursory searching for interesting tidbits turned up articles of a more self-helpy nature than I was looking for. Instead I wanted to mention one disciplinary structure that I have done that I like, which is Morning Pages, or as a former teacher called them, Daily Pages.

Morning pages are a first-thing-exercise, a cleansing three-page stream-of-consciousness writing that shakes the dust off and gets you ready for whatever is next. They come from Julia Cameron's body of work, which includes writing, work on film, and visual art. Her best-known work appears to be The Artist's Way, wherein morning pages and other methods of living a creative life can be found. (I haven't read it, but may see if the local library has a copy I can page through. However, as the subtitle is "The spiritual path to higher creativity", I may skip it). One of my English teachers in high school had us do this exercise every day when class began, and I remember getting a lot out of it. This article praising the concept made me laugh, and remember those "a-ha" moments. For an overloaded teen, they were fascinating and revelatory. While I don't do morning pages currently, I do occasionally still journal.

Virginia Woolf kept a journal, and her husband published excerpts from it in A Writer's Diary after her death, with all the chosen entries relating to her writing. I haven't read it, but now I want to. I came across this quote:

“I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough and random style of it, often so ungrammatical, and crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better; and take no time over this; and forbid her to let the eye of man behold it. And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash and vigour and sometimes hits an unexpected bull’s eye. But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea. Moreover there looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously and scrupulously, in fiction"

Sounds familiar, doesn't it! It looks like good ideas have a good background.  Do you keep a journal?