What are Morning Pages?

Do you ever feel like you sit down to work each morning to find your head swimming with everything but the task in front of you?

Do you ever feel creatively stuck before you’ve even gotten out of bed?

Do you ever feel like there is so much creative potential inside you, but it’s like the door is locked and you can’t find the key?

You might need to try Morning Pages! This is a journaling practice popularised by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way. The basic principle is to write three pages (approximately 750 words) each morning. The two important ingredients is that these pages should be long hand (hand-written, rather than typed) and stream of consciousness (writing whatever comes into your head rather than responding to a specific prompt or doing a particular “type” of journaling, such as gratitude journaling). Morning pages are a keystone practice of The Artist’s Way, and something Julia recommends doing for the duration of the 12-week course and beyond.

The purpose of morning pages

While morning pages are an aid to your creative practice, they are not supposed to be art in themselves. Julia specifically emphasizes that grammar, spelling, coherence, and so on do not matter. In this case, quantity is more important than quality!

Equally, they’re not really meant to be read and reflected on later, like you might do with other kinds of journaling (although I have to admit I have not stuck to this rule…). Rather, morning pages are about getting your thoughts out of your head and onto the page. This serves a few different purposes:

• Clearing out the mental clutter of the morning. It’s a chance to express and offload any thoughts, beliefs, or feelings that might stifle your creative work later. Think of your mind like a computer: instead of having multiple software, tabs, and documents open at once, taking up valuable space on your hard drive, you’re putting them on an external disk (i.e. your journal), freeing up mental gigabytes and processing speed 🙂
  
• Connecting with your inner voice. Even if writing isn’t your main creative practice, you will still have some kind of creative identity and some kind of signature je ne sais quois that makes your work yours. Finding and strengthening your own inner voice through a daily morning pages practice will translate into your other creative endeavors.
  
• Quieting the inner critic. Morning pages is a great place for the inner critic to have its say; not so it can take over and run the show, but so that it can have its safe place to vent. With enough time, and a regular journaling practice, you will also be able to take a step back and start recognizing the inner critic’s patterns: what its beliefs are, what sets it off, and what helps quiet it. Stream-of-consciousness writing is also a good opportunity to start noticing where you inner ally might show up too. While we can’t get rid of our inner critics completely, we can consciously nurture a more supportive, compassionate, and realistic inner voice.
  
• Building discipline and creative momentum. If you can create a regular morning pages practice, you can do it with other things too! Like cultivating your inner voice, showing up regularly and sitting down to write your morning pages will support your ability to show up regularly and sit down to do other things in your life. This is especially valuable if you’ve been experiencing a lot of resistance to your creative work or have been feeling blocked recently.
  

Tips for Starting a Morning Pages Habit

1) Set a time and space. Like any habit, choosing a time and place you’ll do your morning pages will make it much easier to do them regularly. Deciding in advance you’ll keep your notebook next to your bed and do your pages as soon as you wake up each morning (after coffee, of course) makes it much more likely you’ll actually do that, rather than thinking to yourself “I’ll do it at some point tomorrow.”

2) Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or making sense. Seriously. Forget everything you were taught about writing in school and just go wild.

3) Use it as a brain cleanse, not a performance. Morning pages are not designed to be read by anyone else and it is really important not to censor or shape your writing with an external audience in mind. This might be the one space in your life where you have that freedom, so make the most of it!

4) Be consistent but flexible. The “morning” part is a key component of this practice, but I also think doing this practice at any time of day is better than not doing it at all. Equally, if you miss a day, no worries. Simply jump back in. Three times a week is better than no times a week. While yes, in an ideal world we would be doing this daily, I have found that doing it semi-regularly still helps a lot. Done is better than perfect.

New in the BWYA library: morning pages digital journals!

I’m excited to share this brand new addition to the Becoming Who You Are Library: 30-day morning pages digital journals!

These can be loaded onto a tablet and come with handy links to each day, plus questions that will guide you through setting intentions and reflecting on your month of journaling. If you would like to start a morning pages practice and know you could benefit from a bit of structure, I think you will love these journals! Use one for 30 days or use all three for 12 weeks of productive and enlightening morning pages. The choice is yours 🙂

To get all three journals (plus 10+ other free workbooks and video classes), join the Becoming Who You Are Library below.

Have you tried morning pages? What was your experience?