(And while Mike holds down the fort at Terry's Place, I'm over at The Blood-Red Pencil talking about the pitfalls of "ing" words.)
For a number of years, like many people, I wrote while working full time. Unlike many writers who have been at it since they were eight years old, I entered this writing world at the age of fifty-six when I made the decision to pursue fiction writing as a vocation I could retire into rather than just retire away from my day job. The benefit of undertaking writing at this age—more life experience than the young whippersnappers and more outside of work time with my kids grown so no soccer games, swim meets, concerts and plays to attend.
When I began writing novel length material, I came across a technique in the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Julia describes Morning Pages as a way of getting the creative juices flowing by writing three handwritten pages first thing in the morning. These can be anything—a shopping list, a journal, anything you choose to write.
I took this concept and adapted it to my particular needs. I’m a morning person, so I enjoy writing first thing in the day. When I was working full time, I knew I would be wiped out at the end of the work day and not be able to concentrate on being creative. So my solution was to adapt the Morning Pages concept as follows: First thing every morning I reviewed where I had left off the day before in my novel. Then wrote three handwritten pages to continue the story. I went off to work, and when I returned in the evening, I entered these pages into my computer, performing an editing pass along the way. This typically produced two typed pages.
