One hundred days of writing something every morning

I finished a streak this week. A hundred mornings in a row of sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee and writing something — anything — for at least twenty minutes before I opened a laptop. I wasn't trying to draft a book. I wasn't trying to fix anything. I was mostly trying to see what happened.

What happened, mostly, is that I got worse at writing for eighteen days, then unevenly better for the rest. Around day thirty the morning sessions stopped feeling like a chore and started feeling like the part of the day I was protecting. Around day sixty I stopped re-reading what I'd written. By day eighty I noticed I was stealing time during the workday to think about whatever I'd left half-formed that morning.

The rules I gave myself

Three:

• Pen on paper, not a laptop. (I caved twice when traveling.)
• At least twenty minutes. No upper bound.
• Whatever appears on the page is fine. No grading.

I broke the third rule constantly. Most days the writing was embarrassingly bad and I'd close the notebook annoyed. The fix was to remember that the streak was about showing up, not about producing a thing. The notebook is full of crossed-out paragraphs and false starts. That's the notebook working as intended.

What I learned

Mostly small things. Mornings are quieter than I'd given them credit for. The writing voice that comes out before coffee fully kicks in is more curious and less defensive than my afternoon voice. I notice things on walks now that I didn't notice before: a magnolia tree on Sandviksveien bloomed twice this winter and I wouldn't have registered the second flowering without the morning pages making me look.

I also learned, in a way I hadn't really sat with before, that quantity is a perfectly fine substitute for clarity in the early stages of any thought. A hundred bad paragraphs about the same topic eventually surface the one good sentence buried inside them. You can't reason your way to that sentence in advance. You have to write the bad paragraphs first.

Days I almost quit

Day 34 (food poisoning), day 51 (a week in Stavanger and a notebook I'd left at home), and day 78, when I was just bored. Day 78 is the one I'm proudest of. The writing was atrocious — three pages about the texture of oat milk in coffee — but I sat there for the full twenty.

What I'm doing next

I'm taking a week off and then starting another hundred. I'm going to try one tweak: instead of "anything", I'm going to write towards a single question for each block of ten days. First question: "What does it actually mean to maintain a piece of software?" I have feelings on this and no clarity. Maybe the morning pages will help me find the clarity. Maybe they won't. Either way I'll be at the kitchen table.