Monday, July 19, 2021

Craft of Writing: Stretch your wings a bit before digging into a big project.

 Dear Reader,

As critical as I have been over this book The Artist's Way, there is one concept that I think is useful and endorse. That is spending a set amount of time on unstructured, unplanned writing. Ms. Cameron calls this the Morning Pages, because she encourages participants in The Artist's Way to do these pages in the morning before their day really gets busy. I've moved away from Morning Pages in particular and taken to just doing free writing in my journal every morning. It's had mixed results. I'm considering switching back to a timed, free writing blog post in the morning before getting to the featured article for the day.

In either case, free writing allows your mind to wander and limber up before getting down to the serious task of creative work. I spend ten minutes a day doing it. I just scribble out my thoughts and ideas as fast as I can for those ten minutes before I move on to my next task for the morning. Some days it is ranting about things in life that are really irritating me. Other days what I scribble down almost borders on profound thoughts, if it weren't for the fact that they'er nearly illegible because of how fast I wrote them.

It works to warm me up to writing and get me into the proper headspace for working on blog posts, journal work, and novel writing. I highly recommend it.

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