Morning Pages

For something close to 8 or 9 years, I’ve lost track exactly, I have been writing morning pages as Julia Cameron suggests in her hugely popular book, The Artist’s Way. She urges people to write three pages a day, every day, first thing in the morning in order to empty themselves of all the issues that can hang around and cloud their day. First thing in the morning was never ideal for me — the household was just too busy getting ready for school and work. So for a time I wrote them upon arriving at work. After a few years, my morning pages became lunch pages. I would bring my notebook with me to a café on my lunch hour and write them then, with a coffee or in the winter a hot chocolate at the side.

At first I used regular school notebooks but gradually chose a fancier journal type to write in. When I brought a digital camera, a photo was glued in each day to accompany my entry. I noticed that my morning pages were becoming less stream of consciousness and more blog-like. Without realizing it I was heading towards blogging. And now that I am blogging I am finding that my morning pages have become very irregular. Probably because blogging is too similar to what my morning pages had become.

It might be time for me to get back to the real purpose of morning pages, to write without editing myself, to get onto the page all the issues that I’m facing at any particular time, to create a place once again where I can puzzle things out, or at least free my mind to get on with other things and hopefully, as Julia Cameron intended, to encourage my creativity in ways which may have become blocked.