100 Day Creative Challenge Day 62: Write Something. Make Something
Just before Christmas I had two surgeries. One minor and one major. I was told I wouldn’t be able to do much for six weeks after the major surgery and I naively thought that I would write a lot. I’m a person who loves to read and write. That’s my job. That’s who I am.
Instead of being upset about a six-week recovery, I decided to use it as an opportunity to work hard. Little did I know that I would be so tired and brain-fogged that my creative muscles were atrophied. Apparently anaesthetic can affect your brain for a long time after surgery.
So, I set myself the 100 Day Creative Challenge. I would write about 300 words a day for one hundred days to keep my creative muscles working, even if at a crawl pace instead of warp speed.
They’ve been days I’ve wanted to skip or just add a quote, but I’ve committed to doing at least 300 words a day. It’s Day 62 and I’m still plugging away.
The lesson I’ve learned is that this challenge has been in effect a Morning Pages exercise. Julia Cameron writes about this in The Artist’s Way and says that, In order to retrieve your creativity, you need to find it. The morning pages are the primary tool of creative recovery.
This has been true in my own life and I’m sure others will find it too. There’s a principle of creation that is sown deep within all of us. The principle is that if we bury our creativity an don’t let it come out to play, then it will lie dormant. That’s why morning pages work, or doing something every day that involves making or writing something. No matter how small or seemingly insignificant you sow a seed that will birth even more creativity.
After six weeks of recovery, my brain is beginning to unfog and I’m writing again. I just put pen to paper and wrote the last chapter of my fourth novel (very, very, very rough) I’ve been stuck for a while, but I believe doing this 100 Day Creative Challenge has loosened up my creative muscles past the rehab stage and into a renewal stage.
So the challenge today is to write something or make something and see what happens.
You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page. Jodi Picoult
