Morning pages

Have you heard of these things? Julia Cameron wrote a book called The Artist's Way, which I haven't read, but I've read about quite a bit. It's a book aimed at writers, and one big piece of advice she gives is to write morning pages. Immediately after you wake up, Cameron advises, you should write out (that's what she says, write them out—no typing!) three full pages. You can fill them with... anything. What you are writing is not to be read by anyone or even reread by yourself. More than anything, it's about transcribing your thoughts. Cameron argues that this helps to open the floodgates of your writing for the rest of the day.

When we write we have several habits that hold us back. We are judging our own writing ("No one will want to read this"; "This sounds like crap, I'll have to rewrite"), we are rewriting sentences, we  move ahead to the next sentence before we finish the one we're working on. Morning pages help with all these things. They are useful to get out negative feelings about our writing. They let us be scatterbrained and write stuff that no one is going to read—this means that you can jump around, you can make up words, you can make no sense at all, and it's all still helpful.

via artuccino

I have done these on and off in the past couple of years; on during times when I am feeling more proactive about doing things to better myself, and off when I'm just lazy. I liken them to going for morning runs, because while they are super helpful, but there are concessions you have to make:

• You have to wake up earlier. Three full pages before you start your day? I do two, single spaced, and that still takes a good 15 minutes.
• It's hard work. You'd think it would be easy, but when you're transcribing your thoughts you actually have to confront those thoughts—and if you are like me, you spend a lot of your time sitting on those thoughts to make them go away. (While that sounds kind of cryptic, remember that the thoughts you are writing down are the ones that no one else will be reading, probably not even you. Honestly, morning pages are just as effective as therapy as they are for writing blocks.)
• You can't do 'em without a coffee. Or maybe you can. But I sure can't! I don't do them as soon as I wake up, or else I would fall asleep mid-page. Just like you can't roll out of bed and hit the road running, there does need to be a buffer in between sleepy time and hard work.

Not that I'm trying to disuade you! This is an exercise that people swear by and do every morning for years, and I think they would help anyone—writer, musician, engineer, lawyer, salesperson. You can read more about them here, here, and here.

But I'd like to give a piece of advice that I haven't read in Cameron's book or in any of the blog posts I've seen about morning pages. After you've built up a good amount of text, say a week or two, go back and read over what you have written. Don't expect much from the writing and don't be judgmental, remember that the point was not to write a masterpiece. Look instead at what you chose to write about. When you see, day after day, the same issues come up in the morning pages, you might recognize something in your life that you are stuck on. In my case, I learned a lot about myself by reading things that I had otherwise repressed. This can help your writing but it can also help you to figure your shit out. 

Try them tomorrow! It's the perfect time of year to start a new positive habit!