Morning Pages can produce amazing things!

I first found Julia Cameron’s “Morning pages” several years ago, mentioned in her book The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation Into the Writing Life. Every once in a while, I’d try it, but never get more than a day or two into the routine before I’d forget or just plain stop.

For those who’ve never heard of it, morning pages are a concept she first discusses in her book The Artist’s Way (which I actually haven’t read yet, but it’s on my TBR list): “three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning” (hence the name “Morning Pages”). There’s no wrong way to do them – they’re about anything and everything that crosses your mind, for your eyes only. Three pages of anything, and then do it again tomorrow morning.

I decided it was time to try these pages again, and maybe, just maybe, the simple act of writing would help me work through some writing issues I’ve had this last month. I started on Monday, accidentally skipped yesterday, but made sure I wrote today. (Also noticed that today’s writing session went a lot faster than on Monday. Julia did say that could happen sometimes.) About halfway through the second page of stream-of-consciousness writing, I had an interesting story idea hit! Read it and tell me what you think.

Had a thought, but then it disappeared. Lost thoughts… that would be an interesting story, fantastical creatures come along and steal thoughts from their unsuspecting victims. It’s usually out of fun, just teasing, no harm meant. But maybe there’s some sorcerer or other creature who wants all these captured thoughts for themselves and someone needs to go stop them before all the thoughts are taken and people walk around in a confused, unproductive haze. But who goes after this/these being(s) taking the thoughts? How old are they? Is there other magic involved? One of the characters is a creature once believed to be mythical and gets more distressed the more they notice thoughts going missing – the only one that can see the creatures taking the memories. Their friend, the main character, thinks it’s a perfectly normal thing–people forget what they’re doing all the time. But maybe they realize the danger when someone who never seems to forget what they’re doing suddenly does, and forgets something very important. Where would these two have to go? Again, how old are they? What does it take to stop the thought-thieves and restore order and defeat the Big Bad? Ooo – maybe the original job was to just store memories for later to remember happy or special times. But some of these memory keepers get a bit troublesome (What’s the right word?) and started taking thoughts as they formed just for a laugh, and had such a laugh that they kept it up. But a group of those was persuaded/tricked by Big Bad to start just taking the thoughts for him/her. But why does he/she want them to begin with?

I mean… that sounds like a great middle-grade book in the making! What do you guys think? Do you know anybody who would read that? Is this a story I should pursue? Or am I absolutely nuts?

#Books #freewriting #AboutMe #amwriting #ayarnylife #novels #authors #morningpages #WIP #fiction #Writing #fantasy