author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Several actual solid hours of fiction production this morning. About time. I was supposed to have a story emailed to my writing group, like, two days ago; as of now it's still just a collection of very rough scenes. And its critique is of necessity being put off for some time--the group only meets twice a month, after all. But I sat down and I wrote those scenes, dammit. From about 7:30 AM until 9:15 AM or so. At Joe's Espresso, which is the bestest place within walking distance to write at, in the morning.

Whaddaya know? I feel like a writer! Again! I like this feeling. Gee, think I should maybe do this more often?

I've recently babbled a bit about the odd habit-forming nature of guilt. I got that today. Late afternoon, playing Puzzle Pirates (like you do), I found myself suffering from a constant niggling feeling that "I should be doing something productive. There's something I should be doing that I'm putting off. I'm being bad, playing like this, when I should be working." And while that is quite true about, say, cleaning the kitchen or doing the household financials, it's not quite true about writing. I wrote, dammit. From about 7:30 AM etc. etc. etc.

It occurred to me that maybe it's not just that day after day of guilty procrastination forms a habit out of feeling guilty. It might also be that--could it be that?--I like writing. On a deep, fundamental, unconscious level. That "I should be writing" feeling? That's the aforesaid Deep Fundamental Unconscious pushing me towards an activity it finds delightful.

I like that possibility a lot better than the "Superego Weilding The Whip" hypothesis.

Maybe I should aim that impulse at "A Surfeit of Turnips," which, after all my bold words last month, is still hogging the couch, sneezing at the TV, and tossing used Kleenex on the floor. (This has something to do with my not having blogged here since then.) Maybe tomorrow. It's not like it needs that much work before being sent out again. Like, half an hour. That's all I need. I need to do it! Pronto! Stet! And ASAP!

Anyway, about the new fiction: It's the demonic sweater one. Only, this past weekend I finally figured out what's up with that sweater. It's not, strictly, demonic. It's possessive. It's all very bad destructive magic, but it's not in the service of beings from Hell or The Outer Dark. It's just because Mrs. Shemf needs someone to watch the sheep, OK? Is that so very wrong? (Yes. Yes, it is.)

In other news, and just to strengthen my position has having done my writing for the day, dammit, there was writing in the 7:00 AM to 7:30 AM half-hour, too. But instead of fiction production, it was random stream-of-consciousness being hand-scribbled for the space of three notebook pages, as recommended by Julia Cameron in her workbook The Artist's Way. I used to do her "morning pages" exercise, along with or alternately with timed "writing practice" vignettes a la Natalie Goldberg, daily. Religiously. And literally religiously, from time to time, as an offering to the Muse Calliope and other figures in my ecclectic Pagan pantheon. And somewhere along the way I got out of the habit. Then, yesterday, I read this most excellent blog post by Kit Whitfield...

However, the fact remains: I really can't handle a pen. When I turned eighteen I spent a year studying cooking and had to take a lot of lecture notes, which changed my handwriting from joined-up to printed under the pressure of needing legible notes, and now I have a fairly disjointed scrawl. The pen slips and slides all over the page, disobliging me in every direction; I just don't understand how some people manage to control it. In Middlemarch, George Eliot remarks that 'the end of Mr Brooke's pen was a thinking organ'; the end of my pen is making continual escape attempts.

Does this have an effect on my writing? I've been wondering about that. I write three 'morning pages' every day, as recommended by Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg, and those are done by hand; it's an extremely useful exercise, and while it generally produces ramblings about how I need to get the door fixed, with occasional bursts of insight into how to solve plot problems or personal revelations, the fact that it's done by hand is helpful. There's something informal about writing by hand that loosens you up.

In the past I used to write difficult scenes by hand, feeling that this would give them more emotional tone. Since taking to writing morning pages, I do that less; I feel that the three pages of handwriting loosen me up enough....

Followed by several screenfuls of thoughtful meditation on the differences between the writing voices of pen and computer. All of which is really, really worth the reading.

I was tickled to find my own experienced echoed by Real Published Authors, as I always am. In this case, it's both of these "loosening up" effects of pen on paper that I recognize. The "morning pages" excercise skims the scum off the top my brain--all the mundane, broody, day-planning, or just dumb words I have to get through before I can start writing actual stories. (Handwritten pages to rid the brain of such things is also nice last thing at night; it makes it easier for me to sleep and more likely that I'll dream interesting dreams rather than the one where I'm feeding the cats and can't find the Nupro supplements or whatever.) And when I'm having a hard time getting a story started--when I can't seem to find the "wedge" I need to open the cracks and let myself in--the pen and notebook sometimes help me find that way in.

In any case, I started with that this morning. And boy did my hand hurt after three pages! Not for nothing did Natalie Goldberg say of her years of writing practice that they had made her hand strong. I don't have Writing Down The Bones close at hand at the moment (I'm at the Boulder IHOP; my books are at home), but I believe in it she says she can put her fist straight through an aluminum school locker door: "My fourth grade students believe me when I tell them this, because they know it's true. My fifth grade students are more skeptical. I have to show them." That bit stuck with me hard enough that I borrowed it for the climax of a story--which you haven't read unless you're that one college teacher I submitted it to for my exam grade back in 1995--whose main character in fact had to write, as a biological necessity, copious amounts every month, and who ends up stopping a punch with her writing hand and breaking a few finger-bones in the process. Um. The other guy's bones. Not hers.

Anyway, yes. Hand hurts! (No bones broken, though.) And my handwriting--ye Gods, it sucks! But it was surprisingly easier to move into fiction-production mode after doing those three pages, and a lot easier to keep at the fiction for two solid hours, than I've found writing to be in a very long time. I recommend 'em, morning pages.

(I also recommend the rest of Kit Whitfield's blog. Deep literary insight some days, hilarious conversations with her cat on other days. What's not to like?)