Jenn HollowellThe Use of Morning Pages
August 23rd 2008 18:29
The other day, I wrote about how free writing will free your mind. This prompted some thought about the use of morning pages. Here is the definition of morning pages, taken directly from Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way (pgs. 9, 10):
“What are morning pages? Put simply, morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness. There is no wrong way to do morning pages. These daily meanderings are not meant to be art. Or even writing. I stress that point to reassure the non-writers working with this book. Nobody is allowed to read your morning pages except you.”
Why am I writing about this now? I’d like the writers here who are having trouble with free-writing to give this a try. Find yourself an ugly notebook, and write three pages of “nothing that matters” everyday for a month. Then, check in with yourself to see if you’re able to free-write after that. If you can’t, then I’ll try coming up with a different tip.
This tip has helped me tremendously in my freelance writing career. The ability to purge out all the useless thoughts, in order to really dig deep into what I wanted to write about has really been an asset. Sometimes I look back on these morning pages to see what I was thinking about and writing about on various days. Even that experience has placed some interesting topics into position.
Have you heard of The Artist’s Way’s morning pages prior to today? If you haven’t started writing morning pages before, is time your biggest obstacle? If you do write morning pages, what has been your experience with them?
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