It's Monday February 21st, and I finished reading Julia Cameron's book, the Artist's Way in which she presents a way for anyone to release their creativity and live the life that they were born to live as a creative person.
I read it because, while I spend time writing a longhand journal, and from time to time blog in here, I have written two short stories and have two longer works that have been languishing for more than I'd like to admit. So long that I have to re-read them to try to figure out what my characters are doing and where they are.
In itself, the book was quite good though I must admit the woo-woo spiritual style of the language did not appeal to me. Not that I'm against spirituality, rather that there was too much of it, on every single page. The self-reflection exercises (fill in the blanks) and questions remind me of many work-related team-bonding exercises we had. The speaker would let us do all the work, standing in front at the stage, simply pointing and asking team-building-type questions and remarking that there were no wrong answers. Of course that didn't help me.
At the beginning of the book I did all of the exercises, but as I got to the end, didn't pick up a pen, did the answering mentally. There was a sense of too much repetition.
But I did get one good thing out of it, and that's shown by the fact that I'm here in front of this keyboard writing this. It's going to be a 75-percent effort in getting something done. The thing that I got out of the exercise was to stick to Morning Pages.
MORNING PAGES
An exercise done every morning to write in longhand three pages of anything. Just letting your pen flow on the page and gush out whatever comes out. Ignoring the Censor (capital-C) who's there guiding you with structure, spelling and organizing the sequence of thought. And even if you have nothing to say, writing down, "I have nothing to say" on the page was movement of the pen on paper.
I found the Morning Pages super valuable. I started them on February 3rd and have been writing them consistently till today (February 21st as I write this). I haven't missed a day and I found out that it takes me about 30 minutes to write three pages in longhand - especially when I'm just blurting out stuff.
The other exercise that Julia asks us to do early in the book are Artist Dates. In this exercise, you find a day (in a week I think) and head out to treat yourself. Be frivolous and whimsical and treat yourself as someone special. I don't think I managed to do even one. Prior to reading this book I was already used to heading out on my own, to my favorite cafe and sit quietly reading or just enjoying a coffee and a snack. I thought that I could change this to walks in the neighborhood, but I haven't yet done one. I think this is an exercise that I will soon start, it did make a lot of sense to me that writers must spend a lot of time listening, and that will happen naturally when you're outside.
The title of this short note, And we're back... LIVE, is supposed to motivate me to try and get back into the groove that I have forgotten. It's true that I spend a lot of time waiting for some inspiration to hit me before I type a single word. I ask myself if this is worth writing, or even more, worth reading. And I am my harshest critic, because there's a lot to write about. Not just internal, philosophical or meditation stuff, but also technical and interesting stuff. I read other blogs and find that I can get one piece of information in a lot of reading so it's not so important that I make every sentence memorable. It just won't happen.
Last year I tried my hand at doing YouTube blogs - and that was a lot of fun. They were crude and there were a lot of mistakes so one of the first things to do this year is to review them and re-do them, possibly on my new MacBook Air. A couple of training videos on learning Python programming and then more material on building websites using Python and Flask.
I would definitely recommend reading Julia Cameron's book. It did help me get out of thinking that unless something is perfect it should not be exposed to the world. It also helped me write consistently every morning about things that were going on in my mind and eventually releasing them from what was bothering me. I found that Julia's book, specifically the Morning Pages resonates with Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. A book that took me a few tries to try and get finished. The first time around, I borrowed the book from the Toronto Public Library and got through less than a quarter of it. But I found that I needed to borrow it again, and the second time I made it to at least half way. The third time I was committed to finishing the book and I did. Like Julia, Natalie can also sink into woo-woo spirituality, and it's no surprise since I found out that they know each other very well (if I'm not wrong, Natalie may have written the Foreword in one of Julia's editions). But the totality of Natalie's book is like a very long essay in Morning Pages. But in these writing sessions, Natalie gives a ton of guidance.
I have since gone out and bought Natalie's book and plan on giving it a third read. There's really good stuff about getting your words down on the page and making sure that the Censor isn't around when your in your first draft. It's important not to continually edit your thoughts as you type, or handwrite, whatever you are typing or handwriting. You can do that the next day, when your Censor is allowed a brief look at the material. You should compare your material to the stuff you wrote yesterday, and not to what Michael Crichton, Dan Brown or John Grisham are doing today. That will just stall you and your Censor is probably doing that comparison.
The main idea of writing a book is to explore as you go along and make sure that you release the characters to develop. I cannot believe that J.R.R. Tolkien had the Lord of the Rings trilogy mapped perfectly before putting pen to paper. I suspect that some of that stuff came up as he wrote. Leo Tolstoy was another avid writer and I suspect also, that there's a general direction, and that's all you need. You may have a good idea of the ending, but that can change - the character may not want to do what you want them to do.
And so our plan is to write a page here daily, we'll start with some updates on how this is going and then perhaps get back into the storytelling that I used to do on this blog. In the next letter, I will write about my personal experiences with travel in this world of covid. I travelled recently and each flight was stressful and all because of the testing requirements before you can even hop on a plane. I think I'm going to stay put for a while until this pandemic blows over.
Last thoughts in the 10 minutes that I have.
- Productivity is better than talent.
- Perfection is procrastination.
- Write first, think later.
- Passion trumps blank pages.
- If you don't like outlines, don't do them.
- It doesn't matter if your thoughts are disjointed, it's a draft.
- Enjoy the journey, it's more interesting than the destination.
- Feel each word and each sentence as it comes from you onto the page - savour it, enjoy it.
- It's OK to be tired.
- Try writing at least one time when you're super groggy and tired.
- Make writing something you do not just at your desk, but any time.
- Carry a small notebook and a pen to jot things down as your day progresses.
- Read.
- Watch the clock and don't overdo it.
- When the clock says stop, stop.
- It will take a month to form the habit, so commit for the first month to write daily.
- Excuse yourself when. you have nothing to say, and copy your own words again.
- Read (again).
- Sometimes a pen and paper work better than a computer keyboard.
- If it was easy everybody would do it.
- Original thoughts are old thoughts revised for the modern world.
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