If you happened to check out some of the links from last Friday's Fill-Me-In mash-up, you may have clicked over to Jenny Hansen's post about Is Your Blog Eating You Alive?. In that post, she mentioned something that was a bit of an Oprah-style light bulb moment for me. She said that one of the reasons she liked to blog was that it sort of acted like her Morning Pages.
Now, for those not familiar, Morning Pages is an exercise from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. Her program calls for you to write three pages EVERY morning that are a complete stream of consciousness. Her rules are that it should be longhand and that no one reads them. This is supposed to be a way to clear out all the clutter in your head, shut off your inner editor, and open yourself up so that you can tap into your creativity.
I have never tried morning pages. However, recently I have been trying to adjust my blogging schedule so that I have more time to write in the mornings. And guess what I figured out? Even if I didn't blog in the morning, I still wasn't getting to the good part of my writing flow until about the same time I used to when I was blogging.
I couldn't figure out what the deal was. But when I read Jenny's post, it clicked. Blogging has acted as a version of my morning pages. Though I'm breaking the rules--people do read these "pages" (hopefully, lol) and it's not longhand, I do feel like it's a version of stream of consciousness for me. I don't plan out my blog posts. I wake up and talk about what's on my mind. It's clears my head and wakes up my writer brain. So cutting out blogging in the morning really wasn't the right thing for me. I was messing with my method without even realizing it. Who knew?
And on a completely different note, I found this video a few days ago, and my friend Jamie Wesley suggested I use it to show the importance of editing and how even the best of 'em have sh*tty first drafts.
Now, I'm curious to hear about your writing method? Do you do a version of morning pages? What kicks your brain into gear? What does blogging do for you?
