Reflection on Daily Pages
Before I get into this, I want to preface by saying thank you to everyone who has protested the injustice to George Floyd, in Iowa, in the US, and around the world. There have been significant strides toward change. We will continue fighting for change until everyone in this great country is equal. I used to believe in fairness, but fairness is not enough. Equality is what everyone deserves. We will never be free until we are all treated equally under the law.
This is an old draft I've decided to publish today. I read Write Better, Faster (WBF) by Monica Leonelle a couple of weeks ago, when the world was on fire and I didn't think it was the right time to post this.
What's weird about reading this book now: I bought it in 2016, and I'm just now getting around to reading it. Both the Snowflake Method and Chris Fox's books (released after this book and read sooner by me) had very similar information. Why did this book make me hate myself and my process more than either of the others did?
When talking about flow, WBF praises daily pages, and recommends doing them first thing in the morning. I admit, I need to write daily pages. It does help me empty my mind of everything else but the story I need to tell. I hate to be that girl, but it's NOT happening first thing in the morning. I already wake up at four. What time do you want me to do daily pages? 3 a.m.?
What I did while reading The Artist's Way, and what I've gotten away from doing since, is writing daily pages when I "get home" from work. While working from home, I log off my work computer and then walk during my commute time. If I picked this up again, I would start writing after I get my steps in.
Do daily pages help? They help my mental health, if nothing else. I worked through some wrong thinking and healed some old hurts. There are always things for me to work on, so I should get back to it. If for no other reason, I can look back on a notebook years later to remember people's names. I'll admit it: I'm bad with names. Also bad with faces. I'm constantly forgetting important details about other humans.
How about you - Do you write daily, besides your fiction word count? Does it improve the quality of your fiction/mindset/both?
