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Tayari's Blog: Falling off the Wagon

Posted by TayariJones on March 7, 2007 09:45 AM
Filed under The Artist's Way

I'll admit it. In all the hubub of AWP, I have fallen off The Artist's Way wagon. I promise to pick up on Monday with Week 7, "Recovering A Sense of Connection." I have been doing the morning pages-- the three pages of free writing required by the program.

I'm not the only one. Cheryl Minor, has been doing hers too. Here is her account of her experiences with her early morning ritual.

I hate the morning pages. I hate them mainly because they occur in the mornings and I am not a morning person. I have a ritual for starting my day: hear the alarm, mutter expletives, hit the snooze button, go back to sleep. This has worked well for me over the years. However, it has not worked well for my writing since I am still unpublished and working at a job I resent. So, when I read from a published writer that this will work, I figured, what the hay, give it a try.

Of all the exercises in The Artist’s Way, the morning writings are the hardest for me. I expected pre-dawn musings of literary greatness to show up on the pages. What I got was continuous rants of the most petty, irrational garbage you can imagine. Last week I accused my artist of cheating on me (well, she is going out more and dressing better). The week before, I revisited parental advice on my career choices. My parents wanted a doctor in the family, and I was the only one of five siblings in college. We compromised. I majored in chemistry. I spent the first two semesters skipping my organic chemistry class and hiding out in the library reading Tennessee Williams’ plays. You do not want to know how this period of my life played out on the pages. Let me just say that it was ugly.

Finally, this week, I am having a break through. I still hate (despise… resent… loath…where is that thesaurus button when you need it!) getting up and scribbling at the crack of dawn. However, a magical thing is beginning to happen. By dumping all of my irrational, insecurities out first thing in the morning, I am free to feel other things for the rest of my day. I liken the morning pages to Trash Thursdays. My trash is collected on Thursdays. It is never ready. So invariably, when I hear the trash truck coming down the alley on Thursday mornings, I hit the floor running, grab the trash bag, dump the trash, and go back to bed. Same with the morning pages: hear the alarm, grab the notebook, dump the trash on the pages, go back to bed. Clean house. Clean mind. It works for me.

It is not a perfect process. Part of me still has high hopes that by chapters ten or eleven in The Artist’s Way the exercises for the morning pages become mid-day pages or at least after-I’ve-had-my-coffee pages. What can I say… I’m a work in progress.

-- By Cheryl Minor

March 8, 2007 10:15 AM

March 8, 2007 06:41 PM

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