I am not the first person to say this, and I won’t be the last.   And, you won’t be the first person to ignore this stellar advice, nor the last.  But ignore it at your own peril, because it is the key to happiness, to writing success, to world peace, um….maybe even to natural disasters. No, scratch that last bit.   But well and truly, the practice I am about to recommend is, for a writing, the key to everything. 

What is this miraculous practice?

Writing three pages a day.

It is that simple and that complicated. 

All you have to do is just write.  Get out of the way of your ego and your complaints and your ideas about why you can’t write and just go do it. 

What I’m advocating here is not morning pages or journaling, though those are both worthy endeavors which I recommend.  What I’m advocating is committing to write three pages a day on whatever your current creative project is.   It could be a novel, or a short story, or a memoir, or a screenplay.  Doesn’t matter. 

Whatever it is, write three pages.  Go do it right now and then come back.  Honestly, I believe that we make it way harder than it really is. 

If you are a Type A, high achiever, you’ll probably be thinking, but three pages a day is nothing, not even worth my time.  To the contrary.   If you write three pages a day, at the end of the month you have 90 pages, unless my math is wrong.  90 pages!  That is one-third of a book!  It’s huge.

Now, granted, I’m not expecting these three pages to be  in finished draft, worthy of publication shape.  You’re going to be writing, and if you’re like me, you’re going to be writing fast so that you can say you’ve done it and move on. 

But I’m willing to bet that in that fast three pages you’ll end up keeping quite a bit of it.  Oh, there will be successive drafts, to be sure.  But what writing this way gives you is direct access to your inner source, which is, of course, directly connected to the outer source, or creator, or God, or goddess, or the universe–call it whatever you like.  And it is from this direct access that voice and style and all the good stuff that makes you unique comes from.

It won’t be hard.  It will be exhilarating and exciting and wonderful.  Trust me.  Its as good as a spiritual practice.  In truth it is a spiritual practice.