alt=”Me and Jordan on Father’s Day” width=”160″ height=”240″ />

Image by Brett and MB via Flickr

A belated Father’s Day to all the Dads! That’s one of the toughest, yet most important,  job in the world. One of my favorite memories of my childhood is sitting with  my father as he read to me. He claimed that of my first phrase was READ IT! That’s probably why I came to love words and books at a very early age.

I vividly remember some of the stories we read. We read Heidi right after I broke my arm and couldn’t move around much because of the heavy cast. He read the comics to me every night when he was home. He traveled on business a lot, so I really missed our sessions while he was gone.

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I’ve been cleaning out my office. While going through drawers and file cabinets I’ve found many spiral notebooks. (Have I told you that I love spiral notebooks and steno pads and all sorts of office supplies?)

I’ve found lot of notes from  writing conferences, snippets of ideas and character sketches, and most of all, years and  years of morning pages.

Morning Pages are Julia Cameron’s main tool for kick starting your creativity and moving you closer to your writing goals. Write three pages every day. She says to write them in longhand, which I usually do, and write them first thing in the morning, which I do some of the time.

I do understand that when you do them first, you can get all the chatter out of your mind and free up your creativity. When you do then toward the end of the day, you are rehashing the day. Either way, I find benefit in writing the pages.

As I’m reading back over them, I’m re-experiencing various phases of my life. Some remind me of good times. A lot are reminders to  be grateful for all I have and have had. However, some remind me of the tough times I’ve been through (and survived).

Reading them over evokes a wide range of emotions. There’s joy when I read about trips I’ve taken and adventures I’ve had. There’s frustration when I see myself working too hard for someone else’s goals. There’ a sense of futility or triumph when I read about the trials of child rearing. (If we knew ahead of time what awaited us, would be ever have children?)

Now my biggest question is what to do with them.

Please leave a comment and answer these burning questions!

Do you or have you ever written morning pages?

Have they helped your creativity or your life?

How do you store your pages?

Do you ever re-read them?

What should I do with mine?

Write on,

Lynn

We’ve been spending time at the house on the coast. Lots to do to recover from winter.

We were told it’s been a dry winter. You can’t tell it by the vegetation. Everything has grown like crazy. A little, or a lot of rain and a little sun, really makes the plants put on growth spurts.

We chopped and raked and picked up limbs and pine cones. Some of the plants have totally overgrown others. I cut the growth back around the azalea to find that it was blooming.

Actually working in the yard is great for creativity. There’s nothing like digging around in the dirt to puzzle out a plot problem.

We have a lot of ferns that we didn’t cut before we left last fall. That means they have all these dead fronds. I’ve been pruning and pruning on them. Some are so bad that I was afraid any new growth had been pushed out.

When I cut last year’s growth away, there were little green shoots all curled up and ready to reach up to the sun. The plants looked better than I had ever imagined.

Recently, I edited a manuscript that I hadn’t looked at for awhile. I knew it needed a lot of work. It was an effort I started for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) one year. All I had was a REALLY rough draft.

I knew the story started in the wrong place. (I know very few writers who start where the story begins on the first pass.) However, I had a place to repurpose the first part, so it needed to be edited as well.

I worked through the first chapter, cutting away the dreck and expanding the texture of the story. (My first drafts are very sparse, just touching on the bones of the story.)

The final result surprised me. Some good writing  lurked underneath the first-draft drivel. I really like the characters. Some day they will have a wonderful story.

I’ve always known that gardening stokes creativity. But I never realized that trimming greenery would help me find joy in editing.

What simple task renews your muse? Leave a comment below and share it.

Write on,

Lynn