As I sit at my desk to write today, I find my mind a blank. Oh no—writer's block! Naw. I reject the idea of writer's block. There is always something to write, you just have to find it. I have a drafts folder packed full of... let's count... sixty-two drafts, but none of them really are calling out to me right now. So what else. Well, let's talk about writing itself, eh? Does that sound fun?

When I was in my first year at university one of the required classes was basic English. Everyone had to take it. My prof for that course explained that most high schools in America do such a terrible job of teaching English that a very high percentage of university freshmen have no knowledge of even basic grammar and struggle to write papers for other classes, therefore the university decided the easiest way to tackle this problem was just require everyone take a class on English fundamentals. She was an interesting lady. One of her assignments (one of many) for that class was to keep a journal of daily "morning pages", which she would check every week. The class was around 300 students and she had multiple classes so I always wondered where she found the time to check so many journals, but there we go. She didn't just want to teach basic grammar, but wanted all her students to be practicing writing constantly.

For this assignment we had to buy Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, a fairly short tome from a writer, poet, and teacher that I've since learned is considered one of the best books on the philosophy of writing. I quickly learned to love this book.

^{Image by StockSnap from Pixabay}

Right off the bat in the book Natalie introduces her basic rules which include never stop and don't edit. Those might have different titles in the book; I don't have it right in front of me at the moment. Never stop refers to how many people will pause and stare off in space while searching for an idea. Rather than doing that, keep your hand moving at all times. Don't stop writing. Even if what you end up writing is nonsense, write it anyway.

Don't edit is maybe my favorite one. I've talked about it on Hive before many times. It goes along with never stop writing. Don't pause to cross out or delete a word or sentence. Don't go back and rewrite something you just said. No editing. Keep going. You can edit later, but editing is not writing and this is your writing time.

Another rule included not caring about correct spelling, grammar, or punctuation. All of that can be fixed in the editing stage, but for writing they are all unimportant. Yeah, giving students a book telling them not to mind grammar when the purpose of the class was to teach grammar sounds like a strange idea. Like I said, the professor of the class was an interesting lady. There was a method to her madness; she was trying to make us fall in love with writing and therefore be more interested in writing correctly as a consequence of wanting to write better. I'm not sure if her idea worked for many of her students, but it was a good approach.

^{Image by Jon Hoefer from Pixabay}

Another book we had to buy for the class was The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. This is the book that introduced the idea of "Morning Pages" which if you'll remember is what our class professor wanted us to write everyday.

The idea as presented by Julia was to write three full pages of... something everyday. It could be a story, a diary entry about your feelings, cooking instructions, or even just "I can't think of anything to write" repeated again and again until it filled the pages. The basic idea here is to get past our inner critic. So often we do have ideas but we also have a voice in our heads telling us "that's crap; don't write that down: someone might read it and you'll look foolish". If we want to be good at writing we have to get past this inner critic, and forcing ourselves to write 3 pages of nonsense everyday is a great exercise to do just that.

These two books go together well, not just for the morning pages exercise but writing in general. I still have both these books on my shelf now, thirty years later and halfway around the world. I don't really reference them anymore but I like to keep them there as a reminder. Maybe one of these days if my kids need them I'll pass them on. If any of you are looking for some good writing books, I'd say these two are two of the very best. (If you want a third, Stephen King's On Writing is fantastic.)

At the time I was angry about the class. My English score on the university entrance exam (called the SAT in America) was pretty high and I had always passed my English class in high school with near perfect score. I felt insulted to be forced to take basic English at university. What a waste of time! Turns out because of that professor and her unique way of teaching, I ended up loving the class. Funny how that works out, eh?

I don't do morning pages anymore—though I suppose in a way my daily posts to Hive are a kind of morning pages—but I did really enjoy the exercise in that class long ago and I think it did make me a better writer. I'd fully recommend both that activity and the basic writing "rules" from Writing Down the Bones. If any of you are trying to join @traciyork's HiveBloPoMo but are struggling with the daily writing, you might benefit from these things.

Ok, anyway, I didn't mean to ramble on so long. Hope you could get something from this somewhat unstructured writing practice!

(This is the internet so I'm sure you can find both books easily by sailing the high seas, but if you are more morally minded they are both fairly cheap on Amazon.)

Misc: Title graphic made by me in Photoshop from this image by Nile from Pixabay

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.