Morning Pages are the wastewater
I hope you are enjoying these holidays and spending some quality time with your loved ones.
I've taken a couple of days off to have some rest. Although it takes some conscious effort, it feels good to take a break from programming.
I'm mostly just reading and writing, and this week I've written an article about my habit of writing 750 words first thing in the morning.
Morning Pages are the wastewater
Most ideas are bad.
But if you don’t have patience for the bad ideas, you’ll never get the interesting ones. Your creativity is like a pipe of water where the first mile of the piping is filled with wastewater. The wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives.
Writing 750 words first thing in the morning is letting out the wastewater.
The hardest thing with this is completely ignoring the inner critic who will cringe at the notion of just writing anything you think of.
But you have to go through the crap to arrive at interesting ideas. Although interesting ideas can come randomly, by writing crap, you increase your chances of getting interesting ideas. You write everything you think of, and that makes you more receptive to your ideas. This makes you more creative because you simply start to have more ideas.
Writing everything you think of trains you to start paying more attention to your ideas. It trains you to ignore the inner critic who wants to silence you. You learn to take your ideas more seriously and your inner critic less seriously.
750 words first thing in the morning is like clearing your mind of all the things that are bothering you, so you can start writing about things that are interesting.