Writing Morning Pages is still the practice I most recommend to anyone who wants to bring writing into their life, and to anyone who wants to live a more deliberate life.
April 8 was my 6-year Morning Pages anniversary! I just recommended Morning Pages again, this time to a friend of my husband who was visiting us this week, and who wants to write but is scared to do so. I gave her Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write, which was my entry into the practice of writing Morning Pages. In fact, it was my entry into understanding how to creative process works, something you’d think I would have learned as part of my MFA program but alas, that was not on the curriculum. The Right to Write is still the book I most give as a gift.
Morning Pages are entirely non-committal. You’re only writing for yourself, anything you want. The key is to write them every morning before your brain even fully wakes up and with it your inner critic. I just had coffee with a student the other day who told me she’d started writing Morning Pages again and found that all her writing flowed more easily now. Writing Morning Pages looses up your writing muscles and keeps them in shape, in the same way that practicing scales keeps pianists’ fingers limber.
You should also write Morning Pages by hand.
I find it incredibly grounding to see my handwriting glide over the page.
It did take me a while to get used to writing by hand again as I hadn’t done a lot of that for quite some time until I took up Morning Pages. But writing by hand is surprisingly easy to get back into, and now my handwriting feels like my friend.
First thing in the morning, I brew my coffee and then retire to the living room couch with my mug of steaming java to write my two pages in my DIN A4 Black n’ Red notebook. Julia Cameron recommends three pages but the two pages in my notebook are pretty large and have proven to be just the right amount for me.
There’s a certain magic to arriving at the end of the second page,
where I quite often have an insight I would not have had, had I not dumped all the other stuff out of my brain first.
I’ve celebrated my Morning Pages anniversaries on this blog every year, and my post from last year sums up pretty much all my insights:
What 5 Years of Writing Morning Pages Can Do
However, I did not want to let this year’s anniversary go by without commemorating it. I do think it is a tremendously positive and life sustaining practice, one I hope more and more people will get into!
I admittedly haven’t done much in the way of handwriting in a long time. I’ve gotten so used to using a keyboard for writing.
That’s the challenge, but it’s worthwhile!