early morning

My alarm rang at 7 this morning, loudly, but not piercingly enough to cut through the thick layer of sleep shrouding me from the world outside my dreams. Nearly an hour later, I jumped out of bed in a mad frenzy of the body, though my mind was still suffused with soporific lethargy. I hopped on my bike and rode to College to meet a friend for a writer's breakfast.

Note that I said writer's breakfast, not writers' breakfast. My friend is not only astonishingly skilled with the pen but also a rich reservoir of creativity from which the most unexpected thoughts spring freely. She had just come back from a creative nonfiction writing workshop and was eager to put some of the strategies for increasing output and productivity suggested there into practice.

Ours was a variation on the theme of morning pages. Traditionally, one would sit down every morning and write two or three pages of random stuff, not with the intent of publishing but simply as an exercise. Like a fictional diary or a rough blog that no one will ever read. I guess the idea is to write profusely about anything that comes up and to collect material that might later come in handy when penning larger pieces. Creating your own source material, in a way.

This is quite a bit different from how I use the blog, though quiet similar to what I had initially intended. The blog was supposed to be a writer's laboratory, an incubator for originality and an immediate workshop for the training of my paltry skills. Write often, quickly and spontaneously was to be the motto. Improvement will inevitably come with practice.

I write often and sometimes spontaneously but never quickly. It takes me as long to edit a post as it takes to write it in the first place. The reason is that I write for an audience, though I'm loth to admit it and never planned to. Over the years, the only change I've noticed in my writing is that it's become more prolix, with a-thousand-page posts nothing out of the ordinary. Something clearly went wrong. I took this morning as a change for redress.

The problem is that I am not very creative. Sitting down behind the bluish screen hovering above my coffee, I chose the most straightforward and predictable topic conceivable. Staring into eternity beyond the white wall of the library café didn't inspire my imagination to run circles around reality. But at least it got me to writing, out of the blue, with no preformed thoughts in my head, in less than thirty minutes, a few paragraphs that I'm not afraid of showing. That's surely worth getting up early for.