750 Words

Back in 2003, I was introduced to The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. It is about living the life of a creative person and includes a number of exercises. At the time, I was member of a group in the Hyde Park neighborhood who were interested in writing. Some of us had been published, others had not; some were academics, some were teachers, some were housewives and so on. One of the guys had been in a group in California that had used this book as an organizational tool.

Our group chose not to use it, but I read it and found some interesting things. One was the suggestion to do some daily writing called "morning pages." Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in "long hand", typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It's about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day.The exercise is not intended for people who plan to write necessarily, just people who want to get their creative juices flowing.

I recently ran across a website devoted to this exercise called 750 Words. The idea is that this is about the number of words in three pages of writing. You go to the website, sign up and every day they send you an early morning email reminding you to type your 750 words. If you do it on the website, it keeps track of your writing and lets you know whether you are keeping regular with the exercise. It also offers some statistical analysis of your writing -- whether you use an average amount of adjectives, for example -- and some ideas about what your writing reveals about your inner life. I am a bit skeptical about this latter, partly because it is obviously done by computer and is based on word counts. Since English is such a rich language, many words can mean widely different things in context and syntax, and so one cannot assume a person who uses the word "rough" is a Clint Eastwood type, or a golfing type or a sandpaper manufacturer. But if you are interested in this sort of thing, I do recommend the book and the site.

One thing I discovered was that by writing on the site, I was neglecting my writing here. I was happy to discover that I can write on the blog, cut-and-paste to the site, and it works. It does throw off their record of how fast I am writing/typing, but I had done it on-site long enough to know that it takes me on average about 15 minutes to type 750 words, at a rate of 55 words per minute.

According to my word processing software, thus far I have written 501 words up to the end of the last paragraph. So I am only two thirds of the way to my goal for today. But don't worry. I don't intend to force you (or even invite you) to read 750 words here every day. Most of my entries on that website are just stream-of-consciousness ramblings about the weather, work, the cats, and that sort of thing. In some ways, it is more a mental dumping process to clear the mind for morecreative work later, although the tools do allow you to use it for sorting through ideas.

Okay, that is 609.

This morning I am heading off to run some errands -- make a deposit in the joint account at the bank, mail in some bill payments and run over to Baraboo in a probably futile attempt to find a gift for our retiring Youth Services Librarian. Cornerstone Gallery used to have some very nice pins (brooches?) that featured postage stamp designs taken from book covers of classic children's books. If they still have them, I think one would be a perfect small gift for Charlotte. In the best of all possible worlds, not only would they still have them, they would have one for E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. I know it is one of Charlotte's favorites, and she even has a spider's costume that she wears sometimesat story hour when she is reading the book to the children.

750 words.