Years ago my friend Jill told me about The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a book of advice for people who make their living in the creative arts. Perhaps the best-known suggestion in the book is a practice Cameron calls “Morning Pages,” a kind of stream-of-consciousness journaling to be done each morning. The idea is to write longhand in a notebook for three pages without stopping, putting down whatever comes to mind. “There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages,” Cameron writes, “[T]hey are not high art. They are not even “writing” . . . and they are for your eyes only.”
Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page…and then do three more pages tomorrow.
I’ve done Morning Pages on and off for years. When I was working full time I would do them while sipping a latte at Small World Coffee in Princeton. Now that I’m retired I sit at a table in the corner of the living room, a spot I’ve reserved for only that purpose. I’ve always found the practice to be illuminating, and occasionally revelatory.
These days I don’t do exactly what Cameron prescribes in that I no longer write three pages. As my life has gotten simpler I’ve reduced that to one page. Cameron would not approve. On her blog she’s written that much of the value of doing Morning Pages comes after you’ve run out of things to write, when you find yourself discovering what’s on your mind that you didn’t realize was there. But in these days of retirement and coronavirus isolation, when each day looks so much like another, I run out of things to write after half a page, so I may be complying with the spirit of the exercise.
As Cameron notes, Morning Pages are not intended for anyone else. In fact, they’re not even intended for later reading by the person writing them. The value is in the practice itself — using the exercise of putting pen to paper as a way of gathering your thoughts, clarifying your concerns, and formulating your intentions.
I’ve been working on losing weight during the shutdown, so one of the things I do in my Morning Pages (I still think of them as “pages” even though I write only one each day) is note what my weight is and what my plan is for eating that day. I also make note of what’s on my agenda, to the extent that I have one, and sometimes muse about what I’m going to blog about.
Given how similar my days are, my Morning Pages are pretty repetitive too. Anyone reading them might be reminded of Jack Torrance in The Shining writing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over. But there’s something centering about the practice nonetheless. It’s a little ritual that signals that I’m starting my day, and provides a way of deciding what I’m going to do with it.
Morning pages are most valuable when I become aware of something I’m not entirely satisfied with and start brainstorming on paper about what I might do about it. It was in my Morning Pages that I acknowledged that I wasn’t getting enough exercise and decided that I would buy an elliptical machine and use it when I watched TV, which I then did.
If you make your living by means of your creative output, I recommend taking a look at Julia Cameron’s website and perhaps reading her book. If, like me, you do not make your living as an artist but are curious about whether Cameron’s advice might be relevant to you, you might be interested in the book, The Artists Way at Work: Riding the Dragon, written by Mark Bryan in collaboration with Julia Cameron and Catherine Allen.