Morning Pages: The Hated Healer (Jan 18, 2010)

Sitting down to do Morning Pages is like having a meeting with someone I dread. Nothing this person is going to say will be cheerful -- they always complain and say nasty things about life. Things won't get better, they'll get worse. Sure it's sunny now, but bad weather's coming. You're going to do WHAT?! Good luck with that.

Trouble is, the person I meet during Morning Pages is inside of me. It's the meeting with that ugly, gloomy, hateful part of myself that I dread. Well, that and the fact I generally write before breakfast, which is its own problem -- I'm hungry!

I don't want to come in here and listen to it dump bad scary things on the page. Worries about my future, regrets about my past, feelings associated with the perceived inadequacies of my abilities and talents. But when I do, which I ought to do every day, I find that all that muck tends to stay behind, stay here on the page where I put it. It's not so prevalent in my mind, doesn't hang around quite so intensely to cloud my thoughts during the day.

I recommend Morning Pages to everyone, artist or not. Three full pages (both sides!) of longhand writing done in the morning, or, presumably, whenever your 'morning' is. If you wake up at 10 pm to get ready for a night-shift job, that's your morning. Get up at least half an hour earlier and sit down with pen and notebook. It doesn't have to be good, or even make much sense. Get all that crud out of your brain so it won't be so pesty later on in the day.

I bought a scary, neon-green 3 subject notebook for my last Morning Pages book, and I've taken to writing in it with green ink. I hate doing Morning Pages, so I tend to want the most horrible book I can find, yet I'm cheap, so I want the least expensive for my money as well. Therefore I hit dollar stores a lot for this purpose. I had it in my head to go to Staples and buy a pack of their shrink-wrapped notebook packets - five or six single subject notebooks for cheaper than you'd buy them singly. So I went to Staples, expecting to find the wide-ruled notebooks they always sell that way, sadly, when my general preference is for college ruled. "This'll be perfect for Morning pages though," I thought, "since I want to write on wide rules for that. Less writing!" And so I was disappointed, in this particular backward way, to discover my Staples store had in stock shrink-wrapped notebooks ... that were college ruled. Oh, the irony. I bought a single wide-ruled book, since my last one was college ruled and it took /forever/ to fill three pages of that thing.

Give Morning Pages a try. They'll help you clear your mind for your day. And yes, you may well hate them. A lot. But, as Julie Cameron says in The Artist's Way, that's a sign that you need to do them.

Sketching. And Writing. Really. Well, sort of.

Note to self: when planning to watercolour a sketch, don't sketch it with a water-soluble sketching pencil. Also, don't try to erase lines made with a water-soluble sketching pencil with a gum eraser. Success rate is low.

Other than that the sketching is going alright. I'm experimenting with using colour or just going black and white. I couldn't sketch the kids at the bus stop yesterday because they weren't there. So I settled for sketching a few pictures from my newspaper, and they turned out okay. I'm hoping to get out to the park this weekend and try sketching some other people and/or things.

I know this is meant to be primarily a writing blog, but the writing has been pretty ... not there recently. I've felt drawn to the art side, so I've meandered a bit. Julia Cameron, author of The Artists Way, in an interview I heard on tape, mentioned jumping from one creative frying pan into another. When this creative endeavour stops working, she jumps to another one. I feel the same way lately.

I still have plans to complete my manuscript, at least in a usable first draft edition, before CreateSpace's offer ends at the end of July. I also have Associated Content articles to work on and two short stories to write, not to mention I keep bumping into ideas all over. Frustratingly they're mostly bits of things: pieces of setting or background or the like. But I'm writing them down. Hopefully they'll prove useful in conjunction with plots or characters at a later date.

I'm coming back round to the concept of 'Ass In Chair' - in order to get all these projects done I must sit my butt down in the chair and write. My manuscript's not going to edit itself, nor are my stories going to write themselves. A periodic diversion for art is all well and good, but my nose has to go back to the grindstone soon.

Here's hoping you all have a great weekend. See you Monday.

Pursuing Your Secret Dreams

Greetings, my little ones! I'm glad to see you all here today. Let me hand out your graham cracker snacks to keep your busy little hands occupied whilst I get things going.

I spent a couple hours last night learning a new Jonathan Coulton song on the guitar, so I'm a bit more random and abstract than perhaps is normal for me in this blog. But then ... yesterday was pretty out there, too, wasn't it?

It seems when I let my inner artist/inner goofball out to play, what follows is a period of lightheartedness and sometimes weirdness. Spending two hours listening to and playing a song about an evil genius who makes half-pony half-monkey monsters for his love, whom he keeps captive in his secret lair, may be partly to blame for that.

Songwriting is something I've never considered myself good at. I love to play guitar and sing, and I frequently find myself making up snippets of songs for no good reason. The Artist's Way invites the reader to list some alternate lives, lives you think might be fun to try out. Whether your secret dream is or was to become a cowboy, an opera singer, or a comic book artist, Julia Cameron asks you to pursue a tiny piece of those dreams, just to get a taste. Maybe you can't move to Texas and become an actual cowboy, but can you take a horseback riding lesson? Perhaps it's not possible for you to be a drummer in a famous rock band, but can you get your hands on some secondhand drums and play them in your basement when no one's around to hear? Indulging your secret dreams can please your inner artist and be a fun diversion from your workaday life. You might even find an opportunity to live them on a higher level, if you get the opportunity to vacation on a ranch, or bump into a couple of musicians who'd be willing to jam with you one Sunday a month.

When I indulge a passion I don't focus on, like my guitar playing, it can open up windows through which other creative juices flow. I get something different out of each of my moods. My writing style varies, as does my subject matter, depending on whether I'm feeling down or happy, pedantic or just plain weird.

Think about your secret dreams today. Can you tap into them, even just for an afternoon? You might discover a whole new side of yourself.