Becoming One with the Page

Julia Cameron wrote in her book "The Sound of Paper" that sometimes the writing itself can be like the page dictating to the writer instead of the writer dictating to the page. We work all our lives in places where we have to dictate opinions, listen to others opinions, and come up with solutions. That is life. As writers this experience should be forgotten; we need to let the page and ourselves become one. This is not a religious related thought; we are working to better our relationship with the page here-not with our higher power.

The page begins and ends with our writing. But it can be even better when we let go of all the fears and just write. Working from Michigan with the fallout of an economy, and working inside the United States where gas prices are rising with regularityl, I find that some things are out of my control. When I let go of the page, when the work writes itself like the flowering of a tree, I allow myself to be connected to the page. Dictating will sound like lecture: Do this and that on the page, work from a thesis, follow all the rules ... none of it is fun. What is fun is allowing ourselves to both live on the page and develop a reason not to fight the writing process.

If I cannot control the Michigan economy or the price of gas, why try and control writing? We are so used to being controlled that we want control over something else. However, this is no holy grail or ancient secret. In my experience it is hard not to dictate to the page especially for a whole day, and working is usually about control. We cannot trust the page to do us right, so we have to force the issue.

Artists in general have a mindset for this already in place. We are told to just move the brush around in shapes, not thinking but acting. Acting on our ambitions is always good, but we still want to control it. The painter has a sale to make, the writer an article to publish, the musician a ballad that will complete an album.

There is no silver lining in being an artist; but working it out in our heads and finding how we will allow the piece to flow is important. We can open our imagination when we allow the art to become what it wants to.