Hooky
Jonathan kept tripping on the chickens. Maybe a thousand or more. Where had they come from? Perhaps he had been playing the pipes in his dreams and they had followed him home from farms over the distant hills. Maybe they'd poured out from under the manhole cover like clowns. Maybe there had been a blizzard of eggs and the moonlight or dawn was warm enough to hatch them. But no, these were too big. Too big, too white and too covered with feathers. Soft, angry, loud and milling about as if they wanted something. Maybe cheerios. But there weren't enough cheerios for each chicken to get one and then what would he eat for breakfast tomorrow? They had eaten all the grass and the zinnias. Maybe they were a plague of locusts, only different. Jonathan went back in the house and shut the door. He would have to go to school some other day. MST
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THE MORNING PAGES
"Doing your morning pages, you are sending--notifying yourself and the universe of your dreams, dissatisfactions, hopes."
3 pages of longhand writing, strictly stream of consciousness...
There is no wrong way to do the morning pages. Meaning, DOING THEM, PERIOD, is the right way. :)
Morning pages are nonnegotiable. Try your very best to write them, 3 pages a day, even if it isn't necessarily in the morning, or longhand. Morning, and longhand is best, but doing them at all has its own merit. And you're doing this for YOU, so do it with an "easy does it" mindframe.
Do anything until you have filled 3 pages.
"It is very important to understand that the time given to morning pages is time between you and God. You best know your answers. You will be led to new sources of support as you begin to support yourself."
With MPs, says Cameron, "[W]e begin to sort through the differences between our real feelings, which are often secret, and our official feelings...." From The Artist's Way
Now for the real morning pages, which aren't intended to be read and not worth reading.
2 comments:
After years of doing stream of consciousness "morning pages" (I didn't call them that, what did I call them?), my abilitly to structure senteces and use proper punctuation deteriated dangerously. So I stopped doing it as stream of consciousness, and went back to proper sentences, more like a journal.
I tend to write my flash fiction stories and poetry in a modified stream of consciousness type writing--which may not be a good thing. I used to do free-writing before I read that book, and I didn't and don't always do them in the morning, but ever since I read The Artist's Way, I have often called them morning pages. Or afternoon pages. LOL! And I don't do them every day, but my Psion journalling serves a similar purpose and I do it when I can. Sometimes, I sit down in the AM right after I get up for a crack at my nonoffical morning pages, which I do NOT do longhand, and I time them a la Natalie Goldberg rather than doing 3 pages a la Artist's Way. What it does for me, I think, is greases the wheel of word flow and allows writing to pour out more easily. But not all writing is good writing!
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