Here’s the thing about starting a blog: it costs money. Hosting and all the services that work in the background to get your words on the Internet, that costs money, every month. So there’s a little incentive to keep writing, keep producing content. If you’re like me and you started the blog to have a platform for writing more, this puts you in an awkward situation when your pedestrian interest in writing wanes.

Creativity has always mystified me. Earlier in my life I always thought of myself as a “Computer Brain”: logical, pragmatic, and straightforward. I was more concerned with getting good grades and going to a good college and getting a good job than I was with producing something for myself.

But these were little narratives that I would tell about myself, and they were far from the whole story. Creativity is as much a part of me as it is for anyone. I taught myself piano in eighth grade and guitar in college. I wrote songs. I created whole worlds and stories for Dungeons and Dragons for several years. That little voice in my head telling me to “focus on what’s important” was just me parenting myself.

The Artist’s Way taught me to ritualize creativity and to sanctify it. One of the most important practices from that book is “Morning Pages.” In a nutshell, you wake up every day and write a couple pages of your thoughts. No planning, no structure necessary, just go go go. If you can’t tell, it’s how I’m writing this post.

I’ve long believed that our thoughts are not as neatly ordered as we like to believe. Our thoughts come to us in fragments, out of order, and with pieces missing. We don’t actually depart from this turbulent stream of thoughts very often, and we get away with it because the storytelling brain, the default mode network, the part of us that constructs a coherent sense of identity and ego, operates in retrospect.

Writing my Morning Pages feels like panning for gold in the stream. It’s methodical and tedious at times, but every little grain found is precious. It’s the most comfortable part of creativity, because there’s no pressure to produce something. You’re just gathering those thoughts, building up a stockpile of gold to work with.

I’ve been doing it for a while now and I desperately want to move to the next step of my writing journey: actually writing novels. But what got me here isn’t what is going to carry me forward.