WESTPHALL

At some point over Christmas break 2021, after discussing my plan to give writing a try, my friend Lara recommended to me Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. It’s a workbook of sorts, designed to walk you through de-cloging the creative pipes in order to unlock the potential of your artistic endeavors. One of the methods for keeping the imaginative avenues clear, according to Cameron, is to do Morning Pages, a practice of hand writing three pages of thoughts in a journal every morning before beginning your day’s business. It has been described as “transferring your thoughts in order to clear your head,” a sort of stream-of-consciousness journaling designed to clear out the mental cobwebs before sitting down to work, whatever that task may be. 

Great, I thought. I’ll give it a go. Since I’ve never really written anything outside of an academic setting, I was happy to try any or all suggested routines to help establish a pattern for myself that will lead me to…what exactly? I wasn’t entirely sure, though the original plan was more along the lines of a personal diatribe on politics and religion and the inevitable (unfortunate) intersectionality therein. But I didn’t know what that would look like (a book? A series of essays? Something else entirely?) and Morning Pages seemed as good a method as any to help figure that out. Here is a very brief snippet of what ended up happening.

Excerpts from Morning pages:

“They say this process works. I’m certainly ready for the metamorphosis.”

— January 4th, 2022, first day of Morning Pages

“I doubt very much I’ll ever become a novelist. I truly just don’t think my brain works that way.” 

— January 5th, 2022

“I can’t tell yet if [morning pages] is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. I thought about trying a thought experiment where I envision a person, what they look like, someone somewhere, and then wait to see what they do. Authors of fiction often describe their relationships to their characters in this off handed, autonomous sort of way. As if, after creating them, they just walk about and talk and do and take on a life of their own. Seems very much not how my brain works, but who knows? I’ve never actually properly tried it. So here I go.” [I close my eyes and there she stands. I write] “I see a girl…”

— January 8th, 2022

And that, inexplicably, is how Cora appeared, shortly followed by Lucas, though they wouldn’t get those names right away. On that day, I hand write three pages of what will ultimately be the first chapter of a novel from Cora’s perspective in which I am now well over 50,000 words deep. At the very end in the bottom margin of that third page from January 8th, I write in brackets: [hm…interesting. Maybe this *is* how this works…] 

Et voila. A thought experiment, taken on half heartedly and with no real intention, evolved into a thing I never thought I could create: a novel. And one whose story I actually really like — at least so far. The action, the setting, the crux of the plot (no spoilers) are all born out of deeply seated interests of mine, things or activities or places of which I am very fond. This makes the writing process mostly a written exploration of things I personally like and enjoy, which means I am having a lot of fun while writing. Of all the surprises to have come out of this journey over the last year, enjoyment has been the biggest surprise of all. 

I have owned my own business in a creative field (photography) for long enough to know that what draws people like me into careers like that is never the business side of things. What they don’t tell you when you start out is that only about 15% of your job will be shooting (the fun part) and the other 85% is scheduling and rescheduling and budgeting and troubleshooting software and websites and client portals, and on and on it goes. We become photographers because we love photographs, artists because we’re drawn to paint on a canvas, authors because we’re addicted to a good story. Whether we ourselves are any good at our craft is nearly irrelevant when stacked up against whether or not we are disciplined enough to keep the books and drive sales and stay organized in order to keep ourselves financially afloat. 

So I suppose I thought writing would be similar — a lot more trudging through than soaring along. Not that it’s always easy. There are a lot of logistics to crafting a worthwhile story arc, and it does take planning days and scratching your head days and starting over days. But ultimately I am in control of the story I am telling, and I can tell it using any and every thing that I find intriguing to help me communicate. What fun!

I never knew it could be like this.

And, look. Here’s what I keep telling people. The thing about writing a novel is that you don’t really know whether it is any good, whether you’re at all talented, until you’ve basically already put in all the work. All the dreaming, all the plotting, all the hours — those come first by the truck loads before you get to find out whether or not it will pay off. What a huge risk! But one that I am apparently willing (and able thanks to my incredibly supportive family) to take. 

So here I am, exactly one year into this adventure, with a rough date already in mind for when I’d like to have my novel totally finished. The coming months will be a lot of the tricky business part that no one likes — hiring an editor, figuring out how to pitch my book, deciding if I want to go indie or aim for a big publisher, and (most importantly!!!) finding my readers! If you’ve made it this far, I’m hoping you’ll be one of them. Cora’s tale is an exciting one, set in Morocco with lots at stake and dark secrets to uncover. I can’t wait to introduce you to her — and Lucas and Rishi and Oliver and Leithra and Evliya and Samira and the Hasans and everyone else!

Stay tuned for a preview…

Hannah

P.S. I haven’t given up on the political/religious personal diatribe essay/book/crazy-rant-word-vomit project. So we all have that to look forward to 😈