One of the two keys to The Artist’s Way are the Morning Pages. You write them every morning. They are three pages – three sides of pages for those of you who, like me, will be unable to concentrate on anything else until you know this -and you write them without stopping, not worrying about what your write or whether it’s good. It’s free writing. I decided it definitely couldn’t hurt. Some days – most days – there’s so much circling around in my brain that it feels like there’s no room for anything else. So this morning, amidst the chaos that was created by several misadventures yesterday – I wrote my three pages. No great insights other than I need to have some fun.

Somewhat skeptical of the entire program now that I know that it’s not just about greater creativity but about unblocking from the past – not so thrilled about crawling back into the past, quite frankly – I drove my son to school AND …… immediately spotted the perfect physical location for a scene I’ve had in my mind for – well, forever. I have described it but I know there are more details I could use to make it better. This new spot is not the spot I pictured, but it does share enough characteristics with the spot I have in mind to be very useful in supplying the missing details. I also realized there’s another spot I quite literally pass every day that I could use in my book. I’ve been fretting (yes, I’m that old) about how I can get to where I’m setting my story and find a spot like the spots I need and then it hit me. The spots are here. They don’t need to be there.

So are these realizations because I wrote my Morning Pages this morning and was not in my usual frantic state of mind as I drove my son to school because honestly, I had just driven my daughter down that same street, pre-Morning Pages, and all I noticed was a deer watching us drive by.