This is day 3 of Artist Diary, today’s dispatch is titled Freewriting. You can check out the entire Gameplan here.
If you’ve not done Day 1, please start there.
A note on the assignments: Some assignments lend themselves more to being shared others might produce work that is more private. It’s tempting to think that if you can’t share it then the work is not valuable, that’s not true at all. The work we make ‘for ourselves’ become the raw material for future work. By keeping an artist diary you are collecting ingredients, and good ingredients is the first step to any good meal.
Okay Let’s go, welcome to day 3:
Daily Diary
All of us are far richer than we imagine. While we may worry about being original, remember that you are the ‘origin’ of your work
— Julia Cameron
For the past 25 years, millions of creative people across disciplines have either read the Artist Way, or had to fight of other artist telling them that they absolutely had to read it. The bestselling book included this concept called Morning Pages.
The idea was to write freehand longform for 3 pages first thing in the morning.
It is a revealing practice if you have the stomach for it, but it’s also excruciating for so many reasons. The act of free-writing takes you places you might not want to go, and for 3 pages, that jinn is is not going back in the bottle.
Freewriting is hard, it’s digging through mud to find gold.
But it’s mostly digging through mud.