You Get What You Give

I believe that writing has the ability to replenish ideas, thoughts and clever phrasings at a rate greater than that which it expends them. Put another way, writing something good - something thought-out or off-the-cuff, but clever and insightful and True - doesn't "use up" that idea - it roots it even more firmly in the writer's head, allowing it to grow and flower and bear fruit - new ideas, permutations and combinations of the old.

I participate in a daily writing exercise that I am sure many other would-be wordsmiths use - Daily Pages. My particular flavor of this exercise is the well-done online 750 Words.The basic idea is to sit down once a day and write three pages of whatever comes to mind. I usually write about things that have been bothering me, or my plans for the rest of the day, or how things are going at work. But the point is that these words are to be unfiltered and private - the kind of mental runoff you wouldn't dare share anywhere else. The point is, the entire purpose of this kind of writing is to excrete the shit that would otherwise block the actual good writing. I'll leave the obvious constipation joke to more qualified comedians.

I've found Daily Pages incredibly rewarding - they help me work through bad moods, help me plan my weekends, re-examine my techniques at work, and even keep an intermittent dream journal. Like I said - miscellany and mental runoff. Most importantly, it gets me writing every day, even when I don't have anything to write about. Especially when I don't have anything to write about.

However, I've found an unintentional side effect (for me, at least; your mileage may vary) in that when I dump the contents of my head box out into those daily pages, there's nothing left to take root. And that's where this blog comes in. A chance for me to put the effort in to create polished writing that replenishes the brain rather than desiccating it. I won't write in it every day, and probably not every week, but I'll make an effort.