Where I began

One premise that I hold about blogging relates to the term from which Blog is derived, Web-log. A log implies a journal that should contain serial entries, delivered over time.

I promise to stick to the "rule" in future contributions. But now that I've finally gotten over Stage Fright, I'm going to plunge in with a first post.

I spent Saturday reading Floor Sample, a book that self-help writer and artistic recovery specialist Julia Cameron describes as her creative memoir. I have been following Cameron's prescription for writing Morning Pages -- three pages of longhand each day, penned ideally in the morning, first thing in the morning -- since 1998 off and on, and pretty much always on (though I do miss a day here and there) since that fateful moment in 2002 when I threw all previously hard-wired caution to the winds and decided to start calling myself a writer. Over the years, I have gone through the writing and other creative activities in many of Cameron's books: The Artist's Way, Walking in This World, The Right to Write, The Sound of Paper, and The Vein of Gold, among them.  I have adapted some of her activities for my own students who have enrolled in classes ranging from Educational Planning Workshops to Introduction to Political Science. Recently, I became aware of an online program 750words.com that is modeled after the daily Morning Pages concept. I also have been aware of the disdain that Cameron attracts from many people, some of them successfully published writers in their own right: New Agey, flaky, a waste of time, not about art at all are a few snide critiques that I've heard, with one person asserting that Julia Cameron -- like supposedly Nancy Drew series creator Carolyn Keene and cookbook author Betty Crocker -- wasn't a real person at all.

 

I had been interested in reading Cameron's memoir for all of these reasons, including the intriguing possibility that this author and developer of so much empowering and practical writing advice might not be a "real person" at all.

 

Two Empire State College students enrolled in January 2013 in independent studies on memoir writing with me. This created an opportunity to blend work with pleasure, and to satisfy my own curiosities. I assigned them both Floor Sample among other texts.

 

One of the students -- unfamiliar with Cameron's processes -- called the text heavy slogging. The other one has found Morning Pages to be a healing and enjoyable process but has had little to say so far about Cameron's memoir. I found that the text was a relatively fast read because it incorporated much of the personal story that is loaded into the text of the other books. But I found that it also offered some understanding about how she created her methods of morning pages, daily walks (which other authors of writing books such as Brenda Ueland also advocate), and weekly artist's dates. I was surprised to discover that she treats her own Morning Pages as more than just stream-of-consciousness writing but sees a three-pages-a-day regime as a way to produce 90 pages in a month, a full draft of a screenplay in six week, and me, doing my own math, a 240-page draft of a book manuscript in less than three months.

 

The method behind the process is a practice that Cameron describes as "listening." The book you want to write, the film you want to create, the sculpture you imagine: All these are already made. The task is to let a "something" -- sometimes, she calls it God, sometimes The Great Creator, and sometimes the "something" -- create it through you.

 

Cameron is a recovering alcoholic, and models her methods after the Twelve Step recovery approach created by Alcoholics Anonymous. She asserts that letting go of her addiction to alcohol made the listening easier. As I read the text, I started to think about how "listening" seems somehow to equate to the moments when Stage Fright disappears and prose begins to flow. It's sort of a blend of the Knowledge of Brain plus Knowledge of Heart that I alluded to in my Stage Fright post.

 

On a personal note, I quit drinking alcoholic beverages in mid-December 2012. Reading about Cameron's issues with alcoholism as well as other recovery stories causes me to think that I wasn't in a perilous state. However, I did feel that my enjoyment of wine and other libations was taking over my life, and that the clarity that might accompany non-drinking would help me write more and help me write better.

 

I felt the clarity almost immediately. But I didn't feel the more and the better. In fact, I didn't think I had been writing at all. But then ...

 

Reflecting on Floor Sample prompted a projects inventory. In the three months that have elapsed between mid-December 2012 and the writing of this post, I have completed the following:

1) A book review

2) A book chapter for an edited compilation

3) A detailed eight-page single-spaced response to a book publisher on proposed manuscript revisions

4) An internal report on a matter of college business

5) Four lengthy contributions to a second blog that I maintain entitled Moving Your Body

6) Three conference proposals

7) A detailed layout for a two-hour workshop that I co-presented with a colleague on March 15 on "The Poetics of Sustainability".

 

Looking back, I think I had envisioned "life after alcohol" as a sort of mythic 48-hour day that would let me write and write and write for 24 hours and carry out my business-as-usual for the remainder of that expanded day. Reality: The day didn't get any longer and I didn't write any more than I usually wrote over three months. But I did bring more projects to completion. And the writing did seem to receive external recognition for its quality, suggesting that perhaps it indeed was "better": The book review was promptly accepted for publication; the book chapter, which was conceptual, came back from the editors as strong and with some very helpful suggestions for revision; the book publisher praised the eight-page response as thorough, detailed, and a sign of my ability to produce what was required; the internal report was praised for its quality; all three conference proposals have been accepted; and the workshop was met with success and a possibility for a new, creative work.

 

Morning pages, of late, have stretched beyond three pages of longhand, in four, five, sometimes six pages. Looking at the accumulation of 8-1/2 x 11, college-ruled notebooks, I see the next challenge that faces me is to transfer the longhand to computer files. The issue of morning pages being longhand and "stream-of-consciousness" (meaning that writing about your cat's cute antics is as acceptable as work on that essay that was supposed to be done, oh, say, two weeks ago) is one reason why some writers deride morning pages as "a waste of time." The argument is a good one: If your day only has 45 minutes available for writing, why in an age of computers waste it on time with a notebook and pen?

 

I believe that the value of morning pages lies in listening. The pages offer a chance to do a first draft that is not even really that. It's a pre-draft, or what Kwok Pui-lan (a professor of theology and veteran blogger and book author) calls the "zero draft." It's the "before" of formality, the opportunity to put the knowledge of the heart into words that the knowledge of the brain can understand and integrate with the words that come from research and study.  It's one of the ways, perhaps, to lessen the stage fright before the performance.

 

I titled this post "Where I began." A bit of history might help: I practice tai chi ch'uan, as well as yoga and many sports including running, bicycling, swimming, and walking. I was fairly active with a tai chi group in Honolulu from 1995-2001, and met up with a member of that group one evening for a banquet in 1998. He asked me how I was doing. I responded that I was working so hard that I did not have any time to think, and that that was okay because I enjoyed the hard work. He looked at me long and hard and said, "Three pages, longhand, every morning." I said, "You're crazy."

 

The next morning, I woke up. I did my tai chi warm-up, and thought, "Three pages, longhand. That's crazy." I then picked up a notebook and began to write.

 

Three pages later, it felt a little less crazy.

 

Fifteen years later, it doesn't feel crazy at all.