Ten months of daily writing, and what a strange month it’s been.

As I mentioned, I decided to step up my morning pages, and in March started writing daily scenes. The first half of the month was interesting, purely on the writing front…

• I feel like writing a scene a day rather than writing about my own life opened me to thinking about stories throughout the day. It turned my imagination on in the morning so I was in that mindset more, and more easily, all day. I initially thought doing the brain dump style of writing would clear everything out of my mind so I could focus on fiction, but it seemed to just get me more into my own head.
• I started writing… poetry? Like, not as my morning pages, but after the fact. Which I think goes back to the first point, of just opening my mind to creativity, and it coming out in a different form of expression.
• I noticed that there were days I continued a theme or a character. Not enough to complete a story, yet, but they were interesting explorations that could possibly be fleshed out into character studies or test scenes.

It’s hard to stay creative when the world is rapidly changing every day, every hour. And it’s hard to write morning pages when your morning routine… isn’t a routine anymore. When you wake up and walk a ten foot commute to your desk, and work more because there’s more to do, because you need to be available, because you’re rushing to fill those gaps that had never previously been considered. So I regressed to the brain dump method for the last week and a half, and still writing seemed like a chore. I’m still doing it, even if the habit I was forming is now a “whenever” and “whatever”. And the sad (beneficial?) truth is that we can adapt to anything, so I can carve a routine out of my current situation and get myself back on track. Things look different now, and it’s a strange new normal, but my brain is still functioning, my shoulders are less tense (some days), and I’m still writing.