I am in the middle of reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way [amazon affiliate link], a classic about what it means to be a creative professional. The book is not meant to be just read, it’s a book you use, a book you play.

There are many tasks and exercises throughout, and you are meant to read one chapter at the beginning of the week and use the rest of the week doing the tasks in it.

But, before you even start, Cameron describes a task you will do each morning: your morning pages where you fill three pages with long-hand writing. What do you write? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you start and do not stop until the pages are filled. She says to think of it as DOING morning pages, not WRITING morning pages. I think of it as PLAYING morning pages (like scales).

These pages are write-only. You can destroy them right after. Don’t read them and never show them to anyone. They are not writing—you never want to expose them to criticism because you never want any reason not to do them.

I started my morning pages journal on December 28th and have never missed a day. I can’t wait to do them, and once I start, I can’t wait to finish. Because, right after I do them, I am so ready to write “for real”.

It is 7:45am right now, I finished my pages at 6:56am. The first thing I did was edit the next two posts that are scheduled to publish, and then I opened my topic list and wrote a first draft of this post. I just noticed that I never wrote about my topic list, so now I am ready to write a post about that. Like blind drawing does for sketching, the morning pages prime my brain for continuous writing, which carries through the whole morning.

In Bird by Bird [amazon affiliate link], Anne Lamott’s book on writing, she recommends writing “shitty first drafts”. I am using this advice as I bank blog posts. This morning I reviewed The Practice, and about 5 minutes ago I finished writing the post about banking posts. At the end of that post, I wrote that I had more tactics, and shitty first drafts is one of them.

Right now, I am typing this out as fast as I can, not editing. Just writing. This practice makes it so I have some raw material to work with. Since it’s now January 28th, and this post won’t be published until February 11th, I have 2 weeks to edit it.

Having gotten this far, I think I might leave this one the way this is so that you can see what a bad first draft looks like. In general, I would try to tighten it up—I can see that this one is a bit wordy already.

At this point, I’m just leaning into it. If this is going to be a shitty post, I might as well make it extra shitty so that you can see that there’s no need to have a polished post right away.

The only hard part is coming up with some kind of ending, but I usually find one in the edit.

The Artist’s Way Week 4 asks you to engage in “reading deprivation”. For a week, you refrain from consumption (reading, TV, movies, and of course social media), but not music. It’s meant to open space for you to do your own work.

I wrote about my writing during reading process, which means I need to read a lot to drive my writing. So, this task was hard to accept as useful.

But, it did have its intended affect. With nothing to distract myself with, I wrote a lot more than usual in this blog and in my personal notes.

Indefinite reading deprivation would eventually exhaust my reserves, but this was an exercise worth repeating.