Morning Pages Basics

At the heart of The Artist’s Way self-help guide for (re)discovering your creativity, is what author, Julia Cameron calls the Morning Pages.

…Put simply the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness: “Oh, god, another morning. I have NOTHING to say. I need to wash the curtains. Blah, blah, blah.”
…These daily meanderings are not meant to be art. Or even writing.
…Pages are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing whatever comes to mind.

I’ve never been big on journalling. I knew it has been great for others, but it has never been my thing. When I participated in an Artist’s Way group years ago in Montréal I only half halfheartedly did the morning pages.

I just didn’t see the point of writing whatever came to mind. My mind seemed good at processing this stuff and at a much faster pace than writing it out longhand. So I eventually broke the rules and started writing fictional ideas and children’s stories in my morning pages.

Now that I’m in a new Artist Way group here in Paris (actually we’re using the French translation Libérez Votre Créativité), I’m come face to face again with this “morning pages” thing.

However, this time, seeing that Julie Cameron insists on the extreme importance of these morning pages as the very heart of this creative rediscovery…..I decided to take them seriously and challenge this writing ritual to reveal its secrets.

After about 3 weeks of faithfulness in the morning pages….I’m pleased to announce that we’ve become good friends. And in that process, I’ve gained quite a bit of insight into why this act of writing the morning pages is so powerful.

There is too much to say here about it. If you don’t mind I’ll write a series of posts on what I’ve found when I’ve pulled back the curtain on the morning pages and stared into the heart of its magic.

In the mean time, take a look at this short video as Julie Cameron explains the morning pages and even consider taking up the ritual yourself.