My Morning Pages
I recently resumed a daily practice of writing “morning pages”, the exercise suggested and elucidated by Julie Cameron in her 1992 book The Artist’s Way. A year or two before I hunkered down to write what would become A Letter in the Wall, someone told me about Cameron’s inspirational course/workbook/guide, and it definitely was instrumental in helping me form the habits which would lead to my starting, and completing, my first novel.
It’s amazing how a regular practice, be it mediation, yoga, writing, walking, playing an instrument, napping, journaling, painting, running, or whatever, can provide new perspective, a mental reset, if just for a small moment in time.
The morning pages, just three handwritten, stream-of-consciousness pages, are not meant to be journals. In fact, they aren’t even meant to be read once they’ve been written. They can be saved, and they can also be discarded, and they do not need to make sense or be topical or focused on an objective – unless the writer needs that. The important idea of the pages is to get into the practice, the habit, of daily writing. I view them almost as a mental data dump first thing in the morning, and I’d forgotten how the very process itself can free my mind and open me to the day’s possibilities.
Yesterday morning, among the ramblings on my three pages (which included my noticing a coffee stain on the countertop and hearing one of my dogs snoring in the next room), I was moved to write the following:
Creativity has nothing to do with what we produce for others; it’s a path we take for ourselves. It happens when we mentally absorb something that’s either nourishing or toxic, then turn it into something which can be seen, heard, tasted or felt.
Now, I’m not claiming to have the patent on this concept; I’ve certainly read variations of this kind of thought from many people throughout my life. The point is, I needed to return to the practice of writing morning pages in order to remind myself what I value about the creative process.
When I found an old letter in a wall of my house fifteen years ago, my immediate goal was to learn who wrote it and why. My research had nothing to do with writing a book and everything to do with satisfying my curiosity as I eventually attempted to write a biography. After several on and off years of working on it, I decided that the best way to fill in the gaps and account for what couldn’t be answered through research was to fabricate a life for my subject, turning the little I knew about her into a character whose motivations had origins I could understand.
I’ve noticed that when I go for an excessive period of time without doing something I enjoy – painting, for example – I begin to forget what it is I love about it. The further I stray from the last time I painted, the less inclined I am to feel motivated to pick up the brush. Yet, as soon as I do resume painting, as I did today with a friend in a large, wonderful studio, it was as if I exhaled stale, musty air and breathed in fragrant, clean air. My head felt clearer and I was again connected to the creative process – lost in thought, yet sharply focused.
If you are in any way feeling “stuck”, be it artistically, professionally, spiritually, I highly recommend getting yourself a copy of The Artist’s Way. You don’t need to be an artist to gain something from the book, and you will almost certainly discover, or rediscover, a part of yourself that just needed a gentle nudge to be released.
