George

deciding to blog today as my writing exercise...

i have a friend whose father is a writer. he's not a professional, and he's not published; he left a reasonably well paying banking job to, as i understand it, go to the barnes and noble cafe and write for eight hours a day, six days a week. now that i write about him i can't help thinking: isn't there something just a little bit heroic about that?

his name is George, and he is a fascinating guy. he emmigrated from India to the U.S. with his wife and his young son, and after that, had my friend Kiran and Kiran's little sister, Pushba. the whole family is remarkable, really. of course they have their family problems that they deal with in family like ways, but they are really spectacular people.

i am going to school right now for english, because, as someone who wants to write, i felt like it would be good to get some kind of training, especially because i lack the will to impose the necessary structure upon myself to get things done. but George has no formal education in things literary -- and this, of course, is only a formality -- he could probably teach half the classes i've taken so far. he is a brilliant guy who has read everything, and understood it all to boot. so while talking to him about books, he learns from me the stuffy phrases and terminologies passed around college English departments like "Romantic Movement" and "British Modernism," while i in turn learn things infinitely more valuable from him:

1) do what you have to do: George had to write. he writes. he was compelled to do something, and he had the courage to do it; he's still finishing his manuscript, still waiting for a break, still grinding it out. but he's doing what he means to do, what he's meant to do -- and that is living the life.

2) it takes sacrifice to be an artist.

3) Julia Cameron's morning pages. morning pages are excellent; morning pages is the simplest idea that you've never thought of. it is so outrageously natural, it is the inclination that we generally ignore. it is nothing more than keeping a journal. an art journal or a writing journal or a journal about anything at all -- it has no rules, the constraint of intelligability does not apply. its unstructured artistic anarchy is bound by only one rule: the act of doing it. it is not the journal or diary or book itself that becomes a focus -- it is all about the act of writing in it, which, for me is an important distinction. it is about process, it is about taking notes on your own thoughts, in whatever way they come out. and it is the first thing you are supposed to do every day.

right now it is summer and its easy for me to do morning pages; i have few obligations and a lot of time to myself. the general rule is three handwritten pages, no more, no less, every morning after you wake up. i have yet to get to three full pages, and getting two and a half usually takes me just as many hours; i do about a page an hour, handwritten -- i think slowly and write slower. it'll be much harder to do them once school starts.

but they are primarily a tool to overcome writer's block. i feel like i have perpetual writer's block -- i never have anything good to write about, or i write about things very badly -- so it is easy to see why i've been working on the morning pages exercise. the best effect they have had is anchoring my day around the goal of the act of writing, which i hope will translate into the schoolyear. i want to be a writer, a creator. i need to be writing. it makes writing my priority. it drives me to write. i've been doing it almost every day for about two months now. i've been writing. i'm being productive; and in writing, they say that counts for everything.

thank you George; you are my real-life writing hero.