Having writing friends is great. They understand your writing troubles. They can critique your work giving good writerly feedback. And they have read other writer books that you haven’t.
So, one of my new writer friends recommended the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I immediately went to borrow it from the library. One of the first tools it talks about is Morning Pages.
Every morning you wake up and start writing in a journal by hand. Not on the computer. But by hand.
I already have tons of writing notebooks so why not. I woke up and started writing. At first it was gibberish. Thoughts that popped in my head. And then one of those ideas stuck. And I began writing random thoughts about it.
Until the story formed and I had written an outline for my new story. Not bad. But probably a fluke.
I decided to try out the technique again this morning. Same thing happened. I started with random gibberish and by the end I had an outline for a new story to write.
Will I do this every morning? Probably not. Especially on days when I have to wake up early to go to work. But it is a great technique to use if I ever have writer’s block.