the wonderful world of morning pages
Someone I follow on Instagram said the magic words recently ‘morning pages’. Ah, morning pages. Thee and I wouldst have words.
I mean, that’s the point. Morning pages are about words, and the generation of words, and the discarding of other things like ‘thoughts’ and ‘doubt’ and ‘penmanship’. Morning pages, as invented (I guess? At least the phrase was coined) by uhhh okay, you know, I’ve forgotten the name* but hey, it’s from a book called ‘The Artist’s Way‘, anyway they’re a thing.
The ‘thing’ being pretty simple: you get up and the first thing you do is write. You write preferably in longhand, and you write three pages (suggested, three pages of like, Letter or A4 depending on your country). When I used to do them, I used a bound A4 notebook, the kind you steal from work if you’re in a White Collar Office.
Three pages is simultaneously nothing and the entire goddamn world of effort.
Because it’s three pages, in theory wrote continuously, without stopping, and crucially without thinking and without judgement, which is the all-important and nigh-impossible part.
Morning pages are about getting past the voice in your head that tells you that you suck. If you don’t have that voice you’re an alien. And that voice can be very unhelpful and self-destructive, so morning pages are about getting past it and getting towards something more, I guess, pure and artistic and all that.
I ‘morning paged’ for, I dunno, about half a notebook. A decent length and a decent number of days, and I stopped, to be honest, because it was becoming basically ‘The Diary of Stephen Reid Aged 33 and a Third’, or something, I can’t remember when I did it. It got too confessional. I got somewhat paranoid about it being a secret diary rather than a bunch of old rambly shite. So I ditched it.
But, they (the pages) have uses beyond that. The simple process of sitting down first thing in the morning and writing words, without editing, without self-censorship, builds something. Like muscle, only it probably matters more to you.
Anyway, that’s it. Morning pages. They’re a thing. They’re useful? You should try it. Or just type total bollocks into an empty WordPress entry, like this.
* Julia Cameron, I realized later.