It was January 1st, 2023, and I had big plans. Who doesn’t, on the first of the year? As the old year drew to a close, I had looked back over the previous twelve months and thought about what had and hadn’t worked for me—on a lot of levels. Like most people, I imagine, there were things that were great, and other things that weren’t. One of the things that stood out to me was how good it felt when I took the time to sit down and write about nothing in particular. It felt good to do it, and even better when I realized that what I wrote during these sessions was—and this shocked me—some of my best work. Okay, maybe not my best-best work, but it was crossing into territory I found exciting. I was experimenting. I was honest. I myself found it compelling to the point that it didn’t matter to me what other people thought. I decided, right then and there, that I wanted to commit to writing every day for the next year.
I write for a living, and so I write most days anyway, but still there was something about writing purely for the sake of writing that felt different. There is a lot that goes into writing that doesn’t actually involve the specific act of putting sentences down on the page. Even without taking into consideration things like admin or the realities of running a Substack—with journalism, topical essays, and narrative nonfiction in particular, there are a lot of other components that you have to pull in. There are interviews, and hours spent in archives, and online research, and fact checking, and a million other things. Then you have to organize it all, and sometimes translate it, and think through your story beats. Even when I was writing, I wasn’t always writing-writing. If I hit a period of weeks when sentence crafting wasn’t on the agenda, it was easy to fall out of practice.
There is an adage I’ve heard used by parents of young children, that “sleep begets sleep,” meaning that a baby who is well-rested during the day will also have an easier time falling asleep at night. This can also be true for adults. If you’re over-tired, it can actually make your insomnia worse. Similarly, I have come to believe that writing begets writing, in that the more you write, the easier writing becomes. Perhaps that sounds obvious, but there are certainly divergent opinions on this. If a student or a friend feels like they’re blocked, I usually recommend writing something other than the thing they’re blocked on—fan fiction, an angry screed, anything at all—just to get the gears moving again. It may not work for everyone, but regardless, many writers do believe in the power of writing something every day, no matter what. A common form this takes is a practice called “morning pages.”
I first started writing morning pages back in 2005 or so, after rediscovering Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Morning pages are one of the foundations of her program, along with things like taking yourself out on weekly “artist dates,” and creating a sense of abundance through small acts of care and indulgence. The idea with morning pages is that you write three pages longhand, stream-of-consciousness style, first thing in the morning. You roll out of bed, put pen to paper, and go.
I was primed to accept this practice, since my college writing mentor, Mary Oliver, always stressed the importance of a daily writing “appointment.” (I know, I mention her a lot, but her teaching had a big influence on how I write and teach; it can’t be avoided.)
In the years after my college graduation, however, I stopped writing poems. I stopped making appointments to write things that could turn into poems, and so poems had stopped landing on me. That is how it used to feel—that poems landed on me, as I walked around, going about my day—or at least they used to. I wasn’t sure I was a young poet anymore, but I did still seem to be a writer of some kind. I wrote, or I tried to. I went to journalism school. After a while, I opened up The Artist’s Way again, and started writing morning pages. Cameron has described it as being akin to “a tiny whisk-broom that dislodges dust from every corner of our life,” and it worked for me, I think, on that level, at least for a while. But the problem with my morning pages and that act of “sweeping out” is that what I tended to be left with in the end was just that: mental dust.
