Morning Pages are Magic

I do a lot of my best work looking like this:

That's how I look first thing in the morning, on my way up the stairs for my first cup of coffee. 

I take that cup of coffee straight to my desk, grab my master notebook out of my house purse, and write my morning pages, every single day. And yes, really, when I'm half awake, that's where the sausage gets made.

Let's unpack this a little bit. 

Morning pages are a practice promoted by Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way. The only way they really differ from standard journaling is that you are meant to do them every morning, first thing, and you are meant to write three pages, no matter what, even if those three pages are just you scrawling oh my god I'm exhausted and I have so much to do today and I think the milk in this coffee may have turned.

Sometimes that's all that happens, a laundry list of complaints and worries. And that's fine – clearing your head of the garbage helps you get on with your day in a much healthier way.

But also, if you show up at your notebook every single morning, your brain starts to think you're serious, and every couple of days you break out of the complaint spiral and suddenly you have the hook for your next story, the last lines of your novel, the premise for the screenplay you've been itching to write. And once that starts to happen, you are unstoppable. You have tapped into what Cameron calls the divine, which is a bit much for this agnostic writer, but hey I've lived in California more than half my life now, so I'm willing to say there is some magic ju ju going on here.

Even better: you don't need any special tools to tap into that ju ju. 

I write my morning pages with a Pilot G-2 .07 ballpoint in a wide ruled spiral notebook that I buy in bulk from whichever outlet isn't currently at the top of the fascist retailers list. I write in these notebooks because they are cheap and they are in no way precious or intimidating. You can't make a mistake in a cheap wide-ruled spiral notebook. It's literally impossible to write the wrong thing, or take yourself too seriously. That's a trick I learned from Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, when I was fifteen.

I also try to fill one notebook each month-ish, per Goldberg, because her shtick is about quantity over quality, showing up every day to write at length, in longhand, in a cheap notebook, until you write through all the nothing and find something that is gold.

I call it my master notebook because I write EVERYTHING in that notebook. Over the last three months, I have written travel plans, to do lists, planned menus, and also written the first chapter of my novel rewrite, drafted character bios, and brainstormed the name of this newsletter and the general content I want to include. I use it for my morning pages, and I carry it around jotting down thoughts about my works in progress wherever I happen to be. If I crack a great piece of creative work, I tag it with a post-it, and I process those post-its into various buckets (novel, blog, newsletter, short stories) whenever I have some time.

When I say I couldn't even begin to function without this routine, I am not overstating the case. I set my alarm half an hour earlier than the kids wake up so I can write my morning pages. When we're traveling, and I can't really control my schedule, I write them at any time of day that I can grab the time. I continue to move through creative space because of those pages – I would be lost without them.

If you are feeling a little lost with your own creative work, consider committing to your own morning pages. 

I have been in this practice, in some form or another, since I started a diary when I was seven years old. I don't particularly want to do the math for you on that, but I will say, a lifetime of showing up on the page, even half-sleep, even writing words no one will ever see but you, even writing words you would hate for anyone to see but you, is a creative effort unlike any other, and it pays dividends forever.

Go get a cheap notebook. Go get a good pen. You can start right now, no matter what time it is. Those pages will become the true foundation of your life, your work, and a beautiful testament to these crazy times we're living in, too.