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Morning Page: Self-Referential
Jan. 13th, 2010 04:59 pmThe whole point of morning pages, according to the book The Artist's Way, is that you get up in the morning and do a brain dump of stuff, and that frees the creative channels so you can then go on about your day writing fiction or painting pictures or crafting sculptures from tiny hummingbird eggs, or otherwise create in whatever way your particular talent takes you.
Except what I do instead is get up and write on Fallen Leaves first thing if I have a date to do so, because my morning is England's evening, and often the only free time for the day for my writing partners, even in my same time zone. So I get up and if I have a writing appointment, I write, and it flows beautifully and I don't really have any dross blocking my creative channels.
Why, then, am I doing Morning Pages? And given that I hardly ever write them in the morning, why do I call them that at all? Let's tackle that second one first: I call them Morning Pages because I think it's kind of funny. Besides, as many have been known to point out in justification of a midday glass of scotch, it's five o-clock somewhere. Also I have an lj tag called "morning page" and it lets me find them all easily. I suppose I could call them "Daily Pages", but "Daily Page" sounds like a bad riff on the Daily Show, and also implies I'll do them every day (which I won't), whereas Morning Page merely implies that morning was happening while the words were being written. I'm fairly certain morning is happening in Tokyo at the moment, so see, that part is true. It's also been suggested I could just call them "Pages" But that's kind of... I don't know. Soulless.
So I'm keeping the name "Morning Page". It's ironic, amusing, and has continuity.
Now the bigger question: why am I doing them? I never liked keeping a diary on paper, but part of that was the fact that I don't like writing things longhand, The keyboard solved that problem. Fundamentally, I am a writer, and I like to organize my thoughts in words.
The Morning Page thing got started for me when I took a class on The Artist's Way. In the class, we had to keep Morning Pages by hand, on paper, in a sketchbook, and for the duration of the class, what I found, while I gritted my teeth and hated my way through them, was that I seemed to end up with interesting things. Insights about myself. Deeper questions to ponder. Moments of humor. Fodder for my other creative efforts. In short, the things the exercise was supposed to engender did in fact happen.
Nothing like positive reinforcement to keep you doing something. And with a laptop and LJ, they are even relatively palatable to create.
So sometimes my Morning Pages are dross, and usually they're written when morning is taking place at a location I am not, and they are often rambling, stream-of-consciousness, undirected things. But they have a value to me. I used to say as a designer that if 50% of my ideas were good ones, I was batting a thousand. You have to be willing to try, and willing to fail, to do anything truly outstanding.
So that's why I'm writing them. Now here's a question for you: why are you reading them?
Except what I do instead is get up and write on Fallen Leaves first thing if I have a date to do so, because my morning is England's evening, and often the only free time for the day for my writing partners, even in my same time zone. So I get up and if I have a writing appointment, I write, and it flows beautifully and I don't really have any dross blocking my creative channels.
Why, then, am I doing Morning Pages? And given that I hardly ever write them in the morning, why do I call them that at all? Let's tackle that second one first: I call them Morning Pages because I think it's kind of funny. Besides, as many have been known to point out in justification of a midday glass of scotch, it's five o-clock somewhere. Also I have an lj tag called "morning page" and it lets me find them all easily. I suppose I could call them "Daily Pages", but "Daily Page" sounds like a bad riff on the Daily Show, and also implies I'll do them every day (which I won't), whereas Morning Page merely implies that morning was happening while the words were being written. I'm fairly certain morning is happening in Tokyo at the moment, so see, that part is true. It's also been suggested I could just call them "Pages" But that's kind of... I don't know. Soulless.
So I'm keeping the name "Morning Page". It's ironic, amusing, and has continuity.
Now the bigger question: why am I doing them? I never liked keeping a diary on paper, but part of that was the fact that I don't like writing things longhand, The keyboard solved that problem. Fundamentally, I am a writer, and I like to organize my thoughts in words.
The Morning Page thing got started for me when I took a class on The Artist's Way. In the class, we had to keep Morning Pages by hand, on paper, in a sketchbook, and for the duration of the class, what I found, while I gritted my teeth and hated my way through them, was that I seemed to end up with interesting things. Insights about myself. Deeper questions to ponder. Moments of humor. Fodder for my other creative efforts. In short, the things the exercise was supposed to engender did in fact happen.
Nothing like positive reinforcement to keep you doing something. And with a laptop and LJ, they are even relatively palatable to create.
So sometimes my Morning Pages are dross, and usually they're written when morning is taking place at a location I am not, and they are often rambling, stream-of-consciousness, undirected things. But they have a value to me. I used to say as a designer that if 50% of my ideas were good ones, I was batting a thousand. You have to be willing to try, and willing to fail, to do anything truly outstanding.
So that's why I'm writing them. Now here's a question for you: why are you reading them?