So, did anyone think to click the link in the title of yesterday's post? If you did, and you watched after school programming on channel 56 in Boston (or pretty much any other UHF station that ran the Banana Splits and Brady Bunch reruns in the afternoon) growing up, you might get a kick out of that link. Do the words "Come back here!" ring a bell? If not, click it anyway, and see what the rest of us experienced. I was feeling goofy, so I just kind of threw it in as an Easter Egg.
Anyway, not much to update, but I still feel like writing for some reason. And who really needs a reason to write, anyway? There's a book called The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron, that I used to try and follow. I may go back to it at some point, because I liked a lot of the ideas and exercises in it. One of my favorites was the Morning Pages. Every morning, right when you wake up, your write out three pages in a standard size notebook. And that's three pages, both sides. And it doesn't matter what it's about. It could be total gibberish, it could be three pages worth of "I don't know what to write," but you have to fill all three pages. And then you put them away and don't look at them for, say, six months or so. And only you get to see them, they're not for anyone else. It's an exercise in just emptying your brain and unclogging it, for lack of a better phrase. It's supposed to be stream of consciousness. You might come up with something brilliant in there, but that's not really the point. The point is to get your mind working, right at the beginning of your day.
I did those for a long time, and it definitely works. Just the routine of doing it every day gets your mind working creatively. It didn't take the place of any personal journaling I was doing, although some elements of that would no doubt appear in the Morning Pages. I found myself writing more in general, which really helped me build my standup act. And it also reinforced an idea that I'd seen in other books on writing, which is that you can't do the editing in your mind. When you first come up with the idea, you should write down everything you associate with it, no matter how silly or useless it seems to you at the time. Or, to quote Jon Vorhaus in the Comic Toolbox, "Kill your ferocious editor."
You can't let the words get all trapped in your brain, you have to get them out on the page first. Then you can start editing and paring down to what you're really trying to say, and how all of those ideas fit together (or don't, as the case may be). That's the biggest hazard for me in any creative process I try. I let my doubts about what I'm doing act as a gatekeeper in my mind and stall any efforts to get anything out and on the page, or sketch pad, or whatever other medium I'm using. That I now recognize it seems to me to be a good sign, because that means I can elbow that gatekeeper out of the way and just plow forward. It doesn't always work, but it works more than it used to, and that's a good first step.
Have I mentioned lately that I'm enjoying the hell out of this new mandolin? I'm telling you, I think I got my three favorite birthday presents ever this year. Between the mando, the MacBook, and the TARDIS mug, I really can't help but smile when I think about how great the day was. Not just because of the presents, mind you (Although they were definitely awesome. Just saying.). The fact that family and friends were there to celebrate with me, and I got to play music, and have an actual birthday party for the first time in years, made this year's occasion a real bright spot in a very challenging year.
Please exit single-file, in an orderly fashion. Thank you.
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