These are my morning pages: three pages every day, no thinking, no planning. This exercise kind of saved my life when it seemed like all the words had dried up. I’m posting a series of these muses and subconscious outpourings – they come in no particular order.

23/10/2013

It’s the next 3 pages – just writing, long-hand on paper. It’s either an archaic affectation, or it’s what may become a lost art. Do little girls with tablets and mobiles still practise their signatures? Both their own names and the names of people they have crushes on?

Do we realise how long it must have taken our species to learn to write with their hands – turning garbled sounds into words that mean the same thing to one another? Then devising symbols that convey those sounds on surfaces: so that we don’t have to repeat it, so that don’t have to be there to say it in person, so that it’ll still be there, speaking for us when we’re long, long gone?

We learnt to draw sounds so that people couldn’t twist our words, so there’d be a record. So, sure, I should feel archaic for not clicking this out on a laptop, but I don’t: I love how the words flow out of my hand, an unbroken line onto the clean, empty page – where I can only cross out a mistake, not just delete it.

Maybe the most permanent thing about me is my 1st drafts.