Another week, another five morning pages, this time totalling 2,077 words. I am really glad I have developed this practice, but only a couple things are keeping it from turning into a rut of me tapping out prose that doesn’t excite me. One morning, I was writing something about the mythology of my spirit creatures when I just thought, “Ugh, I don’t like this.” So I rewrote the same paragraph four times, each time changing the details until I wrote something that actually interested me. That’s a useful technique to remember.
The other thing that occurred to me, since I am writing in character POV now (when I remember to–hey, it’s 5:30 am when I do this stuff), is to bring in the soap opera already. I have realized this since I started re-reading my old novel, Dis/inhibition. It’s got a lot of stuff about grad school and careers and life, but in the main, it’s about relationships. X loves Y but cheats with Z. A is at odds with their boss, B, and does conniving things to get the upper hand in the relationship. That sort of stuff. It doesn’t come as naturally to me now as it did ten or fifteen years ago, but it’s still what draws a person into a story, even if it’s about space aliens or spirit beings.
It’s also time again for me to go through what I’ve written up until now and pick out the parts I like the best and expand on them in what I write next.
And just keep at it, even when I feel like it’s in a rut.
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 
I’ve heard of morning pages, but not exactly clear on what they are. A kind of free-writing?
Yep. Morning pages are a free writing technique in which you write whatever comes to mind for ten minutes without stopping, but you do it first thing–before breakfast, even before coffee. And you have to use the full ten minutes, even when you have absolutely nothing to say. If you can’t think of anything to write, you write about the fact that you can’t think of anything to write. The idea is to just keep writing, no editing, no judgments, before the waking part of your mind has kicked into gear and the whole left-brain analytic process starts to block the more free-floating part of your mind.
Good idea. I think I’ll try it. Do you use computer or pen and paper?
You can use whatever you want. I use a computer so I don’t have to transcribe it later if I want to use it in my story.
wonders if i can try the morning papers in the summer since i won’t be waking up and rushing like an idiot
They help. Even a morning person like myself is sort of in an altered state when I first get up. Forcing yourself to write without stopping for ten minutes also pushes you a lot.
I’ll give it a go,