I just had an exciting call with a prospective client, and I gave her an assignment I thought I’d pass on to you. Many people have worked with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, writing morning pages and going on artist’s dates with themselves.

Morning pages taught me some valuable lessons. Most importantly, perhaps, was the lesson that people will wait for you or work around you if you tell them you must write first. Also that if you write three pages each day, you will fill up many, many notebooks.

But morning pages are a true brain dump. I would write to do lists and stress out and meander. Nothing wrong with that, except if you want to write something else.

Here’s a helpful exercise: Write your morning pages on your current writing project. In other words, brain dump scenes, images, ideas, memories, thoughts and sensate details that tie in, or might tie in, to the novel or other project that is engaging you right now.

Let that wonderful morning page time double as your writing work.

Call it a Focused Brain Dump.

This is different from the permissive, wide-open morning pages and in no way meant as a critique of that tool. This is another tool, a way to build on your writing habits, to gain forward momentum. To get your novel started . . . or finished . . . now.

Try it everyday for a week and let me know what you think and what you did.