Morning Pages to the Rescue

NaNoWriMo, Day 2

Previous: Tricking the lunatic in my head by writing in sprints (Day 1)

Mood: discouraged (initially)

Word count: 1693 today + 2505 = 4198

Yesterday I told everyone in my company that I was doing NaNoWriMo. Slightly fewer than 50 people now know I plan to write a novel, or as much of a novel I can cajole into 50,000 words in the next 29 days.

So this morning the Lunatic In My Head crept in and sucked all the gas out of my writing engine, making me sputter, stall, and dumped me on the side of my ill-defined plot with no words.

This happens a lot when I make public any lofty goal. It’s probably why I didn’t tell anyone the last two years I decided to do NaNoWriMo. My success or my failure, they were private. I had nobody to let down besides myself.

So today’s writing didn’t start with ease in incrementing my novel’s word count, I opened the app and wrote a couple measly sentences that were probably the worst kind of cliches.

If I was going to get anywhere near today’s goal of 1,667 words, I had to pull out another trick.

Intro to the Morning Pages, learned from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

I’ve done The Artist’s Way program three times, followed by one waltz through Walking in this World. What’s lingered from these programs is an intermittent semi-habit of handwriting three or more pages in an unlined sketch book with an inexpensive PaperMate Profile 1.4B pen. These are the Morning Pages, and ideally, according to Julia Cameron, they are written first thing in the morning.

In the privacy of my notebook, I wrote all the thoughts swimming around my head, but by “swimming” what I actually mean is frenzied thought panic of someone trying to stay afloat, about to drown in sans serif, and serif’ed fonts alike.

The Lunatic In My Head doesn’t like Morning Pages, because he can’t hide. His oppressive feelings of doom, which are never outright words in my head, spill onto the page, and I know. I know where the problem starts. If the Lunatic were to say to me outright that I’m worthless, that what I have to write is stupid, and will never amount to anything, and I’m wasting time, maybe I should be sweeping, instead of him, because cleaning the house would be a much better use of my time than paying cleaners to do it for me …

All of this comes out in my Morning Pages. All of the nastiness, the pettiness, and when it’s out there, in red ink (my color choice today), I see it for what it is: Fear.

I breathe. I look up at the fog saturated, pre-dawn sky out my back kitchen window. I remember that time falls back an hour tonight, which will make waking at 5am on Monday that much easier. I know later I’ll walk my dog, which always gets my writing engine unstuck. I ask my Lunatic if perhaps he’d like to take up the fiddle? He doesn’t need to sweep anymore, he’s done a good job sweeping. I think he’d be really good at the fiddle, after he takes off the Grim Reaper robe, because Halloween is over.

The fear shifts, lifts, ever so slightly, but just enough.

I’m not expecting miracles from my first draft, I remind my Lunatic, because I am a true believer, one of the devoted, to Anne Lamott’s premise of Shitty First Drafts. Get the words down, then go searching for the gold.

Then I search for the Rhaposody channel I found yesterday, Beethoven Relaxing Orchestra, of all things, and put on my headphones, because my girls, Alex and Katherine, are counting on me to tell their story. Today we’ll meet Nat, who is Katherine’s sister, and I want to know what happens next.

I set my timer for a 12 minute writing sprint and type.

Next: The best time of day to write, according to Ayurveda (Day 3)