Some mornings I write in a black notebook. Other mornings I open a blank document on my computer. I get coffee and light a candle. I sit down before the day crowds in and start typing or scribbling until the noise quiets.
Julia Cameron calls them “Morning Pages” in The Artist’s Way. I call them a way of breathing on paper.
This piece is about practice. About how I’ve stayed with writing when the rest of the world gets loud.
It’s not about brilliance. It never has been. It’s about getting the gunk out of the way. Clearing the deck. Shaking loose the static so I can find the honest work underneath the chatter. The stuff that’s actually mine.
My writing desk helps with that. It’s the same one I had in college. The laminate is peeling. There are chips along the edge and old dog bite marks in the corner. The legs have come off at least five times and been reattached. It isn’t pretty, and yes, it probably needs cleaning. None of that is the point. It’s solid. It works. It has held every version of me that learned how to keep writing anyway.
I’ve written at this desk through certainty and doubt. Through seasons of ambition and seasons of survival. Through moments when quitting would have been dramatic and moments when it would have been perfectly reasonable. The quiet kind of quitting, where you don’t make an announcement. You just drift away and hope no one notices.
What kept me in the room were the pages that didn’t argue with me. Morning pages are private writing. They’re the work that doesn’t need to be useful yet. They don’t fix anything. They just keep me showing up somewhere quiet, which turns out to be enough most days.
There was a season when I promised myself I could write badly on purpose. There was no craft pressure. No improvement goals. Just pages that existed so I could exist too. I knew I had to get through the junk to reach the good stuff, and I trusted the process enough to let the sentences be messy on the way there. That wasn’t quitting. It was survival-level commitment.
Before I thought about audience, platforms, or sales, I was writing for myself. For the girl in pigtails who loved books but kept adjusting them in her head. I read stories about boys who went on adventures and girls who did things, and they were good stories, but they weren’t quite me. I didn’t want to watch the adventure happen to someone else. I wanted to be inside it. Writing became the place where I didn’t have to translate myself to belong.
That instinct followed me into my longer work. When I first wrote The Divantinum Project, I thought the first draft might be the last. I wrote it as a pantser, sitting down to understand the story rather than control it. By the time it was finished, I was on something like draft nineteen, and the version that exists now looks nothing like where I started.
That first draft wasn’t meant to be good. It was meant to be honest. Draft nineteen exists because draft one existed. The joy wasn’t in the finished version. It was in sitting down and figuring it out. Working through the challenges. Letting the story change me before I shaped it.
Before readers could ever discover the story, I had to find it inside the mess. The false starts. The wrong turns. The ugly, messy, brown clay. That kind of discovery doesn’t get applause, but it’s the only kind that counts.
These days, devotion looks very small. Three pages a day. Written whether anyone buys my work or not. Written whether the work goes somewhere public or stays private. Devotion, for me, is returning to the page without asking it to prove anything.
The desk is still here.
The page is still blank when I arrive.
So am I.
Thank you for reading and being here. I’m marking my birthday this week by sharing a piece about devotion to the page, because that’s what continues no matter what else changes.
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