The Surprising Delight of Writing 500 Words of Garbage Every Morning

My mastermind group and I agreed to write 500 words a day in August. I told them, with absolute sincerity, “My goal is to write 500 words of garbage every morning. Hold me to that.”

I feel weird admitting I want my daily 500 words to be garbage, but I do. Because this challenge is about stretching a muscle, not winning a medal at the finish line. This commitment is about showing up, just as I am, not striving to be the shiniest, best version of myself. Writing 500 words a day is about getting words on the page, not getting them out perfectly. 

In Writing Down The Bones, Natalie Goldberg says first thoughts are a great opportunity to capture the oddities of your mind. She writes, “Like grating a carrot, give the paper the colorful coleslaw of your consciousness.” 

In theory, this sounds lovely. In reality, I struggle to allow the mess of my mind to spill out on a blank page. I’m tempted, always, to self-edit as I go, to take a chainsaw to every line as soon as it comes out of my head. It’s painful to witness my own incoherent thoughts, my own lacking vocabulary, my own shallow sentences.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron lays out a convincing argument for the daily act of writing three pages of stream of consciousness thoughts each morning. I’ll admit I felt skeptical at first, but once I put her practice into motion, I immediately saw the benefits. Namely, I wrote a lot more. If writing begets writing—and I believe it does—morning pages quickly became the fertilizer for the soil of my writing life. 

I followed Julia’s advice for a while, and then stopped. Started up again. Abandoned ship. No joke, I have picked up and quit morning pages no less than a dozen times over the past few years. 

What gives? If morning pages are so beneficial, why stop? 

This is a loaded question. Generally speaking, I stop doing morning pages the second I start feeling the need to turn every single word I write into something profound to publish on the Internet. I stop writing morning pages anytime I get swept up in the pursuit of performance, anytime I try to prove myself worthy (of what? love? acceptance? respect? all of the above?). I stop writing morning pages when my obsession with productivity rears its ugly head, at which point I begin to believe the hidden words I write in the dark are nothing more than a waste of time.

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When Everett was a baby, Brett would often be gone 10+ hours a day. I have few vivid memories from that season, but this is one of them: every day when Brett would finally walk through the door, I’d feel an incessant need to rattle off every single thing I had done that day. I’d tell him about the groceries I bought, the laundry I folded, the essay I wrote, how many times Everett spit up into my bra. I’d tell him about the doctor’s appointment I scheduled, the photo shoot I booked, the emails I replied to, that random cabinet in the bathroom I finally cleaned out. 

He’d nod sweetly and listen and pretend to care. Bless him.

Brett and I have this ongoing joke about “the thing underneath the thing.” For example, when we fight about the dishes, we’re rarely fighting about the dishes.

Looking back on the year I became a mother, I can so clearly see now the thing underneath the thing. Me rattling off a small list of accomplishments each day wasn’t about the to-do list at all. The thing underneath the thing was my own flailing sense of identity as I shifted out of corporate America into my new role as a work-at-home mom piecing together a hodgepodge of freelance opportunities. Brett could have come home to find me napping on the couch on any given day and he wouldn’t have cared in the slightest. My daily to-do list rundown was never for him. It was for me. The thing underneath the thing was my own desperate need to prove I had not wasted my day. To prove I could be a mother who also works. A mother who makes art and makes a home. To prove I could do it all.

How I wish I could go back to that younger version of myself, cup her tired face in my hands, and remind her: You are loved, you are loved, you are loved. You have nothing to prove.

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16 days into yet another morning pages practice, I want to do this forever. I’m on a runner’s high. (I don’t run, but I hear that’s a thing.) 

I am truly enjoying the process of writing garbage every morning. I feel free, loose, uninhibited. Dare I say I feel a tiny bit rebellious, like a wild animal breaking out of their cage. This writing is private, and pointless, but the pointlessness is the whole point. I am getting words on the page. Thoughts. Prayers. Questions. Stories. I am working the muscle. Tilling the soil. I am writing without a goal, without a destination. I’m on a scenic drive with all the windows down, sunshine on my face, headed nowhere in particular. Look at the view! 

I forgot how impossibly good this feels. I forgot what it feels like to write without a constant buzz of perfectionism humming in my ear.

I guess Julia Cameron knows what she’s talking about. Natalie Goldberg, too. And who could forget Anne Lamott, who writes in Bird by Bird, “So go ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Use up lots of paper. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend.”

The best part about all of this is the sheer irony: the quickest way to free yourself from perfectionism in your writing is to simply write … garbage.

When I give myself permission to write terribly, something unlocks in my brain. I suddenly find it easy to silence both the inner critic and also the little productivity drill sergeant that sits on my shoulder screaming YOU BETTER NOT WASTE MY TIME. 

Who knew putting 500 words in a Google doc that nobody will ever read, every morning, could lead to such epiphanies? 

At the end of these 31 days, I will comb through that same document, the one containing the mess of my mind, looking for seeds, searching for hints of buried treasure. I will highlight any sentence with potential. I will sit and ponder and stir and sift and see what else could possibly emerge. Maybe something will. Maybe something won’t. Either way, I will never call these words a waste.

Until then, I’ll be here. In this chair every morning. Writing 500 words of garbage.