Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

Are you a morning scribbler, or an afternoon one, or not a scribbler at all? These are my important questions of the day.
I am pretty sure I’ve written about this site before, most likely a year or so ago when I first found it. 750 Words says of itself:

I’ve long been inspired by an idea I first learned about in The Artist’s Way called morning pages. Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in “long hand”, typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It’s about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day. Unlike many of the other exercises in that book, I found that this one actually worked and was really really useful.

It’s a good idea and a fun site. I started doing it again and was on a 13 day streak of writing over 750 per day – then something happened and I couldn’t (or simply did not want to, maybe) write for three or four days. And, I think like the last time I started and stopped, it was because it really wasn’t working for me.

Apparently I have very little brain to dump in the mornings, so most of what I was doing was getting anything in there at all so that I could meet the word count. I tried writing at different times of the day to see if would be more effective, say, at night when it would be supposed that my brain would be a little more crowded. No go! That word count was still in the back of my mind and I would keep looking to see how far I had gotten.

Worst thing about it is, it really hasn’t freed up anything in my mind so that I can write elsewhere. Like here. It just takes up the little time I have for personal writing before I get into the weeds of drudgery writing. So, while I like the idea of the site, and even like participating, I think it’s just not for me at this point in time. I have decided, in fact, (again, I think) that I will just inflict my morning scribbles, disconnected thoughts and story ideas on everyone, instead writing them down on a private, disconnected site. It’s not as if I write anything really private–I have for years been of the belief that nothing you put online is really private. And in recent years that’s pretty much been borne out, I believe, with all the privacy violations of Facebook, Google, so on. I rarely write anything online, no matter how private the space, that I would not mind shouted from the rooftops.

Anyway, just to let you know that anything tagged “scribbles” can safely be ignored by both of my readers, because they will be just disconnected, unedited (as if I edit anything else, either, lol) thoughts and scribbles.

So, this morning I kept scribbling and in the process came up with something to write about in a non-scribbling fashion. It came about because up above somewhere I’d written “at this point in time”, and I remembered that I always get dinged for that by grammar software. So I got to thinking about lazy language, and habits and all that, and that led to thinking about people I know who use language well. And I scribbled up some thoughts about all that.

It’s in drafts now (otherwise known as “The Black Hole”) but it is halfway done so I may finish it. It is on, as I wrote, language–one of the banes of my writerly existence–and how I view the language and very different writing styles of four literary friends of mine. I never, ever compare my writing to theirs because if I do I will just get discouraged. But I love to read their stuff and think about what makes it so compelling, so that’s what I have scribbled about.

Now to do the adult thing and write it out, set it aside, edit it, look it over, edit it again–and only then put it online. Heh.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2012 at 9:40 am and is filed under writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.