I want to tell you about a writing practice that literally taps you directly into the muse.

It’s really simple and doesn’t require any prompts like yesterday, other than the odd motivational nudge.

It’s known as ‘stream of consciousness’ writing, and it often looks exactly as it sounds - utter garbage.

And that’s the whole point. It’s a writing practice that churns the garbage out of your brain so your eyes can sift through it for clues.

Those clues often lead to discoveries, new ideas for plots or frames for a story.

It’s called Morning Pages by Julia Cameron, and no one ever reads them but you!

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In my experience it’s actually not that beneficial to re-read your Morning Pages.

They’re not for producing beautiful prose, or opening loops, or fine tuning your sentence structure.

They’re about casting a WIDE net into the expanse of creativity that lives between your ears, and seeing what you can haul out.

While that might sound a bit brutal, it’s actually thee number one way I’ve found to produce original (as far as anything is original) ideas.

Here’s the process:

Sit down and start transcribing the first thoughts that come into your head.

It could be, “I’m sitting down and thinking about what to write about...” that’s normally how it starts.

But don’t stop with the first thought, keep transcribing, “...and this feels a bit silly, but hey ho I’ll give it a shot. I haven’t written for ages, if ever...”

And on, and on, for 3 pages.

I could hazard a guess why 3 pages work better than 2 or 4 but that’s all it would be, a guess.

All I know is, it’s often not until the last half of page 3 that I feel a wee tug at the net, or the drips starting to flow down the pipes.

Sometimes is takes less, sometimes a lot more (likes many days more 😩) but it always comes.

If you’re a creator of any sort: a marketer, a writer, an entrepreneur, a teacher, a painter, a musician...it’ll almost certainly revolutionise how, and more importantly ‘what’ you create.

Happy hunting!

P.S.

If you want to give it a go I’d highly recommend buying the official journal to write in as it contains (not unwelcome 😅🙏) motivational pieces throughout.