The Empty Page

As a personal retort to the very public experience of the web, I ‘blog’ in a handwritten sort of way into a notebook, as recommended by Julia Cameron of ‘The Artist’s Way’ fame.

Does anyone remember this book? First published in the early 1990s, it became a bestseller, the heart of many a radical creative writing class, and a call to creative people of all genres to get in touch with the muse within.

For me, it became a fetishistic symbol. I’d see it looking inspiring on the corner of my bookcase and take heart from its mere presence amongst my personal belongings. But times were unsettled with many vagaries and pulls on my attention, and I never opened it except to savour the odd paragraph or two in the hot and steamy inspiration chamber otherwise known as my bathroom.

This blogging business inspired me to dig it out again and start reading in earnest. Julia’s advice is to unblock the creative channel and encourage the flow by scribbling first thing. We should sit at our technology-free desks in the time-honoured way and scribble three pages of ‘flow’ unhampered by left brain analysis and other self-imposed constraints. These are the fabled ‘Morning Pages’ and they can set you free.

The idea is to ramble, absolutely without restraint. Get it all on the page and free up your mind for all the clear and sequential thoughts that will flood in later. Petty irritations, rabid rants, family arguments, all can land on the Pages. You can write without excuse or apology cause only you will ever read it.

Theory has it that this lifting of the lid on all the rubbish floating around in our subconscious minds will liberate our creative juices, moisten the seed of our intent and enable the issue of something of writerly value in the day ahead.

I love this idea. And I love to write in a free and spontaneous way just letting the streams of (un)consciousness fall onto the page. What I like most is the absence of any apparent link between my brain (aka conscious thought) and the words that unravel onto the page. It’s as if the act of writing is a direct link between my unconscious and the entirely left brain world of sentence structure and subjunctive clauses. It always feels good and sometimes, as an added bonus, it makes sense.

But if flow is not to peter out to an unenterprising trickle there has to be a schedule propping up the creative act. Morning pages are fun for a one-off but it’s only when you commit on a daily basis that changes happen (allegedly). There’s writer’s block for a start. Nothing to say and your mind’s an empty space? No problem … just keep writing.

In my admittedly limited experience the words do flow, so long as you are not thinking too much about them. So you write your way through your block to the clarity that lies beyond.

And when you have finished, you throw it all away and start over.