I’m ten days in on this project and happy with the progress. There are some struggles, sometimes I’ve thought “What’s the point?” There’s always the reality that there might not be a point. Nothing at the end of the rainbow. But you just have to trust the process. Two crappy pages a day.
Then there are days where it’s a joy to write. Those days seem to come after a good night of sleep.
I do notice that I jump around a lot more when I’m typing compared to when I’m writing longhand. And that could be the charm of morning pages.
I’ve been writing pages in the morning. But I haven’t been doing my Morning PagesTM.
Tools
Here are some non-software tools I’ve been using for writing:
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Composition notebook
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Dr. Grip
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MacBook
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Chromebook
Here’s the software:
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Google Keep
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iA Writer
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Focus@Will or random Spotify tracks found by searching “white noise” or “study music”1.
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Google Docs
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I absolutely cannot write with music I would want to listen to. Sometimes I’ll write with a podcast on. It fills the gaps and might be good while free writing to queue things up. Like in high school I remember seeing a video of a rapper freestyling and being impressed that he could rhyme with random words the crowd would give him. Eventually I realized that the automated prompts can make it easier. Before trying to sit down and write, I was tinkering with Vue.js and… I was going to write the rest of the tech stack and actually it doesn’t matter exactly what I was using. But I was seeing if I could put together something that would let me write timed things based on my Amazon highlights as prompts. Then I got sort of too deep in the weeds and the tinkering became the thing, instead of the writing. So I was programming before and after work and happened to be programming at work at the time also. I got burnt out. I’m still curious about that idea though, because when I tried out a couple of the prototypes, I wrote a lot. They might be good for writing book notes. I tried something where it would give me 8 highlights from a book and then cycle through them. I wanted to see if I could do something where after the first sequence, it would discard the text from the bottom 4 (based on word count) and then you could add to the survivors, then discard half again until you were left with the one idea that you still have thoughts on. I also tried a thing where it would give me one highlight from two separate books and I would write about them together, forcing myself to think about the intersection. Some of the results were interesting. And I wanted to try something with timed writing that would just take you through different steps. There would be a pause button, but there would be no rewind button. You’d have a certain time to write an outline, then you’d have another time block divided up equally (or maybe you could specify what percent goes to what bullet point) and then you’d write each section out, then you’d get another round through, and then you’d be done. By the end, you’d have your first draft. It almost certainly wouldn’t be worth posting anywhere. But you’d have a good idea of if you have a good idea. All in, say, 20 minutes. I should try this out just using a timer. Maybe I can do that actually on the flight I’m currently on. With Bit Timer. ↩