I’ve been off from work this week and attempting to prune through the detrius of a summer move. (Yes, I know it’s months overdue.) I tend not to be efficient at tasks like this, in part because it entails deciding which books to keep. Then I end up re-reading books, or feeling guilty about never finishing Infinite Jest and flipping through its pages trying to figure out where I left off.
It had been a long time since I picked up Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. The writer Kate DiCamillo recommended it to me twenty years ago. I needed the refresher. While I write in my journal compulsively, I hadn’t been doing “morning pages” — essentially, three pages of free-flowing writing in the morning. More to the point, I needed the reminder that to write well we almost always must write badly. We can’t judge those early drafts. We must commit to working hard to improve upon them. And keep at it, even when it’s frustrating and exhausting. Good things can emerge from that process.
“Each painting has its own way of evolving … When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.” William Baziotes
