What's raw is not all bad

I wasn't sure I would be writing anything at all today because I was scheduled to have my last two wisdom teeth extracted. However, I signed myself on for two April challenges, one of which is to contribute a minimum of 750 words a day for every day in April to a site called 750words.com and the other of which is to write a poem a day in honor of National Poetry Writing Month and to make the poem public, which I'm doing at the blog linked to this site at http://guptacarlsonnapowrimo2013.blogspot.com. I couldn't bear the "agony of defeat" and even considered waking up at 5 a.m. to do the writing in case I didn't make it, post-surgery!

Well, the alarm went off at 5 a.m., and the snooze button was hit. Happily, the surgery went well and by about 7 p.m., I felt well enough to sit up in what my husband describes as my "blanket pod" on the sofa, with my laptop. I have been using 750words.com to work on my book manuscript and two book chapters for other projects that I need to finish revisions on. What I wrote today had more to do with writing practice, however, so I thought I would share it here. There is a small amount of repetition in what I've placed in previous posts, but I think the general idea of "what's raw" is not bad comes through.

I started doing morning pages in October 1998, and read the Artist's Way by Julia Cameron a couple of months later. Initially, Cameron's depiction of morning pages didn't sit well with me, and I stopped doing them or did them at best sporadically for several months. My initial impression of the theory behind the pages was that I could use them to process work-in-progress: things I was reading, ideas I was having to synthesize the readings, thoughts that would emerge from the numerous conferences, lectures, book readings, and my work with tai chi and yoga at the time.

Years and years later, this is how I use morning pages: to process thoughts, ideas, projects, ongoing work. Some days, they are mental dumping -- I need to rant about my lack of money; I need to vent suppressed anger about something; I need to write out about something that is anything but the project breathing down my neck at the moment. I also realize that I think this is what Cameron has in mind with morning pages. I have gone through the Artist's Way several times, and even incorporate parts of it into my teaching. I also have worked through Walking in this World, The Right to Write, and The Sound of Paper. So clearly I find value in Cameron's work, and also appreciate that her approach doesn't sit well with everyone.

One challenge that morning pages does present is the act of longhand writing. I believe in it. Deeply. There's something about the audience of self, page, pen, and Great Creator that is special, intimate, and not requiring edit impulses. A lot gets done because it's free-writing, and it's something I can later transfer to a computer file -- giving it the edit impulses (fix the typo, rephrase the sentence, move the paragraphs around) that word processing makes possible in a way that longhand can't. The challenges are making the time to move it to the computer file, and then trying to determine the next step for the work that lies in the computer file. Three pages of longhand, or the rough equivalent of 750 words, does not usually make a full article, book chapter, or essay so using the process of morning pages to get sustained projects done means dealing with overlap, inconsistency, and sometimes complete ruptures or breaks in thought. In addition, time is one of our most valuable commodities. Many days, I write morning pages successfully, have my breakfast, take my shower, and roll into work and am immediately confronted with demanding tasks beyond my immediate control. By the time I think I have a minute to transfer my morning pages to a computer file I'm too pumped up with distractions, breathlessness, and a sense that I need to hurry, hurry, hurry to engage with the edit impulses in a way that I would like. I end up thinking "it's all bad" when the reality is that "it's all raw". It needs the patience of simmer time to gel together.

I was introduced to 750words.com last summer by a colleague, Michele Forte. She was using the site to begin jump-starting her own thoughts on writings she could initiate as a professor in a position finally to realize long-belated aspirations to scholarship. Like morning pages, I started it in fits and starts, and started immediately hitting the delete button on my e-mail notification from "Buster" saying that he thought I should write 750 words today. I thought about unsubscribing, but I also knew enough about my experiences with morning pages that when the time was write, I would commit.

So April is the month of commitment. I am participating in Napowrimo (the National Poetry Writing Month) and have committed to a poem a day. And I am not a poet by training or passion. I just like doing it once awhile. I plan to participate in National Short Story Writing Month in May, and hope to invent some other "national" genre-writing months (no fantasy or sci fi, though) all the way through the famous November National Novel Writing Month, which I joined three times and failed twice. With these commitments, I also decided that I was going to commit to writing 750 words a day in April. And that if it worked, I would continue into May, June, July, August, and eternity. I thought I would use 750 words as a way to convert my longhand morning pages (because I honestly cannot imagine going without them any longer) to that first electronic file, where editable impulses are allowed.

A lot of my friends laugh at my obsession with challenges. Besides writing challenges, I participate in things like "Complete a Marathon in a Week," "Do an Ironman in a Month," and month-long "Squat-a-thons". I also initiate things like six-week challenges to get more fit, exhorted my friends on Facebook every day in 2011 to move their bodies, and am currently training for an Olympic Distance Triathlon in August and what will hopefully be my tenth marathon in September. I feel a little guilty myself that I lean so heavily on challenges, and feel a little out of it when there is no challenge beckoning me on the horizon.

So why do I them do?

One simple answer is this: Because they're fun. For me, they keep me motivated, and they remind me that with the frantically crazy work hours I keep, 11:59 p.m. and 12:01 a.m., the bookends of a day approach quickly. My hope for the ideal life is write in the morning, work and work out until about 7 p.m., have a good dinner and downtime with my spouse, and write at the end of the day. The challenges force me to remember that end-of-day commitment.

(A note on the photo: I found the image via a Google Images search for "writing raw". The page to which it links is a useful site on writing tips and strategies, one of which is "Free Write Fridays." The image accompanies an interview with Rebecca Tsaros Dickson and has some helpful thoughts on the values of writing in the way that the challenges I describe in this post present. You can access the link at http://kellieelmore.com/2012/11/09/fwf-free-write-friday-writing-raw-with-author-rebecca-tsaros-dickson/.