40 Ideas in the Morning

Celebrating the New Year by imagining all the new ideas you will have

Image Description: A view over a rocky expanse of desert. From the top of a hill, the view looks into a valley toward distant mountains. In the foreground, the warm light of sunset turns the craggy landscape orange. In the distance, the mountains turn blues and purples, under a cloudless sky. A white contrail zips over the mountains. This has nothing to do with lists, it is just an image of the place where I live. Happy New Year.

I participate in an online community of writers, where I have been since the first pandemic fall. Recently, I have been writing profiles of the writers who are part of the community: these are both a way for me to get to know other writers, and ways of asking about inspiration, routines, and ways of being. In one of these profiles, the writer told me she starts her days with a ledger book she inherited from her mother. And each morning, on a fresh ledger page, she writes down 40 ideas.

I tried this 40-ideas-in-the-morning idea yesterday, the first day of 2023. I am telling you: it was so hard. For my own list, I tried to imagine 40 texts I wanted to write, no matter how fantastical the possibility of my actually writing them might seem to myself. “A novel (ha!)” I wrote on one line of the ledger. Most of the ideas were more granular than that, though. “A calendar of events at the Rincón post office,” I wrote. “The wind and how it rattles me,” on another line. Others included essays I abandoned in the past, a book of essays that I swear I will finish one day, methodologies for curatorial work, an essay about women named Yvonne.

The woman who recommended this 40-ideas-in-the-morning strategy tells me that it helps her loosen up, makes the individual ideas less precious than the accumulation of possibilities. She writes, “Forty ideas works so well to loosen the thought process, and let one's busy mind be busy for a while before really concentrating. It also helps overcome the perceived preciousness of any particular thought - it's not the last one you'll ever have, nor the best, just one grain in a vast hourglass.” This is why I thought such a list would be a good way to start the new year. But in the challenge of writing the first one, my emotional process went something like this:

• Surely, I have 40 ideas about what to write – this will be a breeze.

• This is such an inspiring way to start a new year.

• Why do I have only three ideas?

• Maybe I am not actually a writer.

• Clearly, I should not write anymore because all of my ideas are five years old unfinished essays.

• This hurts.

• Oh, wait, here’s an idea.

• Please, lord, let these 40 ledger lines fill themselves up so I can go back to sleep.

• (A wordless existential embrace of the impossibility of ever having another idea).

• Thank goodness that is done.

And as I filled out that last line of the ledger page, I fled to a new page to begin writing this edition of Studio for Tomorrow, relieved at how easy it felt to just write a single, finish-able thing, instead of a pile of new ideas.

So: it did make the actual writing much easier, more approachable, and more desirable, if only in contrast to how challenging the list felt.

Despite my own internal resistance, I like this 40-ideas exercise as a way of stretching the borders of my brain, bending it into more malleable (even goofy) ways of imagining what I make. It pushed me to go beyond the more obvious answers—the ways that I draw borders around my own possibilities, despite myself (to spite myself, maybe).

This month, I am making a commitment to myself (and now, apparently, to you) that I will show up for the 6 am writing hour hosted at this community. This requires some significant life re-ordering in order to care for the various creatures with whom I share my home and to complete an hour of writing while also preparing for my morning commute to El Paso and a day of work (and still getting enough sleep, etc., etc.). And to begin this hour of writing, I start with the ledger.

If you have spoken with me in recent weeks, I may have mentioned how much I like the concept of the New Year. I think of it as a lovely fiction that we decide to share: a way to mark newness and possibility in the depths of winter (at least in this northern hemisphere, from which I am writing). I like the new year for the same reasons that I like birthdays: marking time with a ritual celebration is one of the better ways we respond to the idea of time itself (rather than as a unit of monetary value, or an impatient taskmaster, or a sign of our brief mortality flashing by while we doom-scroll or work seventeen jobs to pay for substandard housing and barely available healthcare). I like the way in which the new year suggests we can start again, always.

Within the new year, this idea of a daily list of ideas is also a daily reminder of all the possibilities yet unthought, even on the micro-scale of the individual. I think of myself as my most supportive champion of my own work and even I find myself falling into old habits and old ideas, neglecting to push myself in the same ways that I push my dearest friends and collaborators in their practices. 40 ideas is so hard because it is more ambitious than I have allowed myself to be. 40 ideas is valuable precisely because it seems impossible.

So, this is a suggestion for a new year’s practice for your own studio, in case you are in need of a prompt: Start your day (if you can) in your studio. Sketch out 40 ideas, or jot them down in a list. Let yourself loosen the edges of how you understand what you make. Let yourself tease the genres you have historically worked within, mess up the media that you expect yourself to use, imagine other priorities than the ones animating last year’s work. Past the discomfort of the arbitrary number of 40, see if you can find the newness an exciting possibility rather than a task or set of to-dos. Feel the points at which you can imagine your studio practice most expansively, freely, wildly getting out there. It’s a new year, and the world is in need of some of this intentional re-thinking. And, if you want to, send me a list. I’d love to see what you’re thinking about.

With special thanks to Sarah Lippek, attorney, investigator, whistleblower, and historical researcher, for the ledger idea; thanks also to the writers at Louis Place. If you are looking for a community of writers (which includes visual artists, academics, activists, musicians, and so many more kinds of folks), aLP is currently open (until Friday) to new participants. You can find out more, here.

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Laura August, PhD makes essays and exhibitions. She has curated more than 20 exhibitions as an independent curator working between the U.S. and Central America. In 2021, she was named an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City has been recognized with an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Alongside her consulting practice for artists and writers, she teaches a process, practice, and professional strategies class for artists at the Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She currently makes her home on the edge of the Chihuahua Desert, and she is the first full-time Curator at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso.