When I was a freshman in high school, our English teacher gave us an assignment to keep a journal. We were free to write about anything we wanted, and she promised she would not read our meanderings. The only catch was that we had to fill a certain number of pages each day. Our grade would be based not on our topics, but on our production.
She thus taught two lessons: how to write without inhibitions and how to produce pages on a regular schedule. Granted, when we were pressed for time, she saw journal entries composed in extra-large cursive with every other line left blank as we hurried to generate the designated number of pages by the end of the week. That formidable deadline loomed, and if we did not turn something in, we failed.
After that class, I did not keep a structured journal. On occasion, I wrote stuffy “Dear Diary” entries that were stilted and sporadic at best. Following graduation, I studied music and business and then took a job in a bank, leaving little time for journal writing. However, I did continue to write. In junior college, my poems were published in a literary magazine. While working at the bank, I penned features for the local newspaper. When I moved to a new town to complete my bachelor’s degree in finance, I wrote a few articles for the campus newspaper and the alumni magazine. Journaling was once again relegated to the irregular entry, usually when I felt confused or elated about something.
Fortune smiled upon my graduation. Not only did a handsome and smart fiancé arrive on the scene, but also an intriguing full-time newspaper job in his hometown became available. “Serious” writing came to the forefront, and journaling halted. After about a year, I found that I enjoyed writing enough to try freelancing. Not long after, I discovered Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. She advocated writing “Morning Pages,” a practice I’ve adhered to for the past decade. This informal journaling, three pages of early morning longhand, continues to be rewarding.
I use a simple spiral-bound, college-lined notebook, writing whatever comes to mind. I write as soon after I awaken from sleep as possible, and I do not stop to think about the way I’m writing. My pens vary, although my hand feels most comfortable with a felt-tip or gel-ink pen. Sometimes, I sharpen a pencil or two and scribble away.
The only restrictions are that I must write fast, keep my hand moving, and not cross anything out. If my internal editor scowls at an “incorrect” word or phrase, I simply follow that by writing whatever the “proper” word is and enclosing the right answer in parentheses. Then I continue. For example, a recent entry involved the tree I see outside my writingroom window. “I love that stately old cottonwood tree. It looks like a stalk of broccoli with a flowered head.”
These pages are for my eyes only. Sometimes I jot a paragraph and skip a line before beginning the next paragraph. Sometimes the pages are easily filled. Anything goes here. To-do lists, wish lists, shopping lists, lists of five beautiful things I’ve seen recently, and lists of blessings to count might be interspersed with several sentences about my experiences on the day before. Complaints are also common.
I do not reread what I’ve written until several weeks later. At that time, I review my pages, underline good ideas and phrases and copy them in an idea file. In addition to being helpful for my writing, these pages are also therapeutic because I can see what issues have bothered me during the previous six or eight weeks. Those are the ones I revisit again and again. When I notice a pattern of negativity, I seek solutions. What actions can I take to alleviate this problem? Is it something petty and whiny that I need to drop? Sometimes, my problems are actually solved while writing. I might pose a question in my morning pages and have the answer right at hand as my pen moves across the page.
Although I’m not striving to write three pages of great prose every day, quite often ideas for stories, poems, and articles flow into my morning pages. Flow is the key word. My main objective for doing morning pages is priming the pump and stimulating my writing. Touching pen to page in the early morning with a preset goal breaks the ice of the blank page. My thoughts may be disjointed, ranging from “It’s sunny but cold today. I miss my dad and wish he could be here to give me his advice” to “I don’t have anything to write about today, and maybe I should just go get a real job.” Most days, however, I enjoy writing these pages, and the mere act of writing them often sends me to my current project with greater energy and enthusiasm.
This increased zeal proved helpful when I worked on my book Amelia Earhart: The Sky’s No Limit, one of the premier titles in Forge Publishing’s American Heroes biography series. Faced with a tight deadline, I tried to compose one chapter each week while still writing morning pages. Doubts assailed me. There was so much information available about the famed aviatrix. What specifics should I include? How could I condense so much research into a fascinating read? After all that had been written about Amelia before, how could I write something fresh? How would I ever meet the deadline?
I surmounted these fears by turning to the page. Whenever I felt afraid, I wrote longhand in a separate spiral notebook. Rather than scribbling whatever came to mind, I jotted specifics about Amelia and the book. I combined my journalism training with my morning pages practice, asking myself the pertinent “who-what-where-when-why-and-how” questions and further focusing my thoughts by limiting this “interview” to each chapter. What events were occurring in Amelia’s life at that time? What was going on in the rest of the world at that time? What was the main objective of the chapter? Who were the people involved? Where was Amelia? What was she doing? Why were these topics important? Could I just write three longhand pages answering these questions? Happily, yes, and frequently even more. This “idea journal” demolished the deep freeze of my fears and helped clarify my thoughts. Often while writing down the answers to these questions, I glided into real prose and began composing sections of the chapter.
When my editor, Dale L. Walker, suggested using a single word for the title of each chapter, it helped me think even more clearly. “Tomboy” guided me through Amelia’s childhood, and “Turbulence” illustrated a particularly rough period of her life as well as one of her risky transoceanic flights. In the way that pilots take test flights to evaluate the performance of a new aircraft, my idea journal became a testing ground for ideas to take flight. In my case, however, intense scrutiny of the details would come later. Whatever I wrote down was okay because I could “fix” it later. The purpose of the journal was to provide a private space where I could write anything that occurred to me with regard to the task at hand. I was not risking editorial judgment but letting my writer glory in the joy of the journey. This journal allowed me to “fix” my thoughts before I affixed them to the prose of the chapter I was writing.
As my crafting the book progressed to Amelia’s disappearance and the abundant theories about what happened to her, I found myself slowing down. Throughout the process, I came to know Amelia well and considered her a mentor. Among many other notable achievements, she flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean in her single-engine Vega and later wrote, “Everyone has his own Atlantics to fly. Whatever you want very much to do, against the opposition of tradition, neighborhood opinion, and socalled ‘common sense,’—that is an Atlantic.”
She did not mention the opposition of an internal editor, but these few words helped me cross the sea of pages necessary to completing her biography. By the time I reached the epilogue, I was paradoxically working at what felt like a snail’s pace because I had enjoyed writing so much that I did not want to stop. In addition, I did not want to “close the book” on my relationship with Amelia Earhart. As a result, her quote about each of us having her own Atlantic to fly appeared often in my morning pages and still pops up when I face writing challenges.
Although I keep the idea journal, I do destroy my morning pages after I’ve reviewed them. They are private pages, after all, and by shredding them, I am keeping my bargain with my writer that they will not be seen by anyone else.
The idea-journal method helps with fiction as well. When writing my collection of short fiction, Pecker’s Revenge and Other Stories from the Frontier’s Edge, I kept notes for each story in a separate file folder. To distinguish these notes from my morning pages, I switched to 8 ½-by-11 yellow legal pads. I “assigned” myself three longhand pages of free-writing about the story. When creating fiction, as with my morning writing, I must write quickly, keep my hand moving across the page, and disallow crossouts.
Sometimes this free-write is entirely about a character. Sometimes dialogue comes. Sometimes a scene suggests itself. I write until the information dwindles. Many times, the words come so quickly that I write six or more pages. To keep my mind fluidly working on the story, I usually jot down a question or an idea that I’d like to write about the next day. This provides a starting point for approaching my task. These pages often ramble and go off on tangents, but after a few sessions, I know my characters well. Sometimes, the entire story is there, and sometimes I just have a glimmer of an idea. It doesn’t matter. I’m only playing around on the page trying to fill the three-page quota as rapidly as possible. When I feel I can no longer write this way, I turn to my computer and start typing what I’ve written. On occasion, the story practically writes itself and I don’t have much polishing or editing to do. More often, though, I find myself simply typing what I’ve already written longhand. When I have the horrid first draft with huge gaps and rare transitions entered on the computer, I print the pages. At that point, I can usually “see” how the story goes and move forward.
Again, pen in hand, I read what I’ve written and start jotting down whatever comes to mind. When the words begin to flow, my cursive spills across the bottom of the page and onto the back, and even onto blank yellow legal sheets. This is not at all neat but it doesn’t matter. This is not for publication, after all, but for me. And hey, I really like that first paragraph of sharp dialogue. That’s got great conflict. What if …? You get the picture. This technique would not work for everyone, of course. But from my daily practice of morning pages, I have learned to break the ice on any writing project by taking pen in hand and simply writing down whatever comes to mind. By allowing myself the freedom to generate ideas and get my thoughts on paper without worrying about my internal editor, my actual editor, or the response of readers, I compose myself on the page. In the process, I discover the composition that is trying to get written. In this way, I’ve written two unpublished novels as well as numerous published works, including the Earhart biography, two nonfiction books of Wyoming profiles, two short-fiction collections, several short stories, magazine and newspaper articles, and even a few poems.
My words have spilled onto the frosty blank page each time through lessons learned years ago and followed today. All because of that simple high school assignment to keep a daily journal and an English teacher’s pledge to let that writing remain private.