Hi all — I saw a talk by Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Way last week and she spoke at length about one of my favorite subjects in this realm — the importance of lowering the stakes of your creative practice. For me, this refers to 3 things —

• Time: sometimes all I have is 10 minutes to write, so that’s how long I’ll write for. I love a good 2-3 hour session, but those are few and far in between — without the sprints, I doubt I’d have the endurance to survive a longer session.

• Word count: obviously closely connected to the above, but I’ll just add that writing 3 sentences is like 100x better than writing 0 sentences, especially if they make you actually feel something (for me, typically it’s mild amusement because I’ve written something absurd).

• Quality: this is probably the most important one, and it’s why I created this newsletter in the first place. In order to write the really good stuff, you need to write soooo much crap.

The great news is that the most recent prompt really lends itself to an exercise of lowering the stakes — so I would be truly honored if its comment section was filled with lots of short and dumb descriptions of excessive breakfasts (in addition to the beautiful work that’s typically shared, of course):

Respond to the last prompt

Best,

Jasper