Morning pages work superbly. Except when they don’t. Two problems I encountered and how I overcame them (for now)
I first started using morning pages (as defined by Julia Cameron and the often overlooked Mark Bryan) when I picked up a copy of The Artist’s Way at the MPH bookstore in Singapore in 1995. Since then I have returned to them off and on. Mostly off, to be honest.
Until relatively recently, that is, when I began a regular daily habit of doing them. Doing them hard. My streak of pages is now well past the 18 month mark. That is impressive, I think. Well, it impresses the hell out of me.
In The Artist’s Way, it’s suggested that three pages — handwritten — is the optimum to aim for. I use my Mac now and I’ve translated three pages to mean 1,000 words. I think that’s about right. It also means that I can store the pages and look back at them. This may not be strictly in keeping with the discard ethos of Cameron and Bryan’s approach but I find there is the occasional spark in there. And when I wrote the pages by hand all those sparks burned only briefly because I couldn’t read my handwriting.
The pages, then, are working for me. To an extent.
Yes, there is a but, as with every useful practice. If the purpose is to clear the shit from your brains on a daily basis, I either have more shit stored in my head than an archipelago of guano islands or I’m plain doing it wrong. I suspect it’s a combination of both.
I can’t do anything about the shit for brains — except write more morning pages and there is only one morning each day where I live — but I can look at the process.
And therein lies the first problem. Time.
Not the time taken to write the pages but the time when I write them. That’s important. The time I take to write the pages is fairly constant. I stick to the rule, for the most part, of writing without stopping. Of typing without stopping. I plough through the typos and ignore the red wavy lines under the words in question until I get to the end and run the spell checker. (I use Scrivener, by the way.)
No, the issue is if I don’t get to the pages first thing. I find that if I sleep late and the day starts with me having to rush out or get things done in the house and leave the pages until later, I’m no longer clearing out the shit but I’ve somehow switched to diary mode. I start narrating the previous day. That slows me down a little and I find myself thinking more than I should and, by the time I get to the end, I feel dissatisfied. The purge has not really worked.
In short, the morning pages are no longer morning pages.
So the solution to this is to make sure, as much as humanly possible, that opening Scrivener and starting to type is the first action I do when I get up. That may make me sound a real sad sack but here’s the thing; although the quality of what I write is much worse when I simply let it pour out, its effects are much better for the rest of the day. Counter-intuitive, perhaps. But it’s worth remembering that the purpose of the pages is not to produce deathless prose but to remove the barriers that stop your ‘real’ writing happening.
Which brings me to problem two.
With 1,000 words written in the morning, there is a temptation to believe that writing for the day is done. A daily word count over many months of 1,000 words a day is serious production, after all. We’re talking close to the weight of six books. Hail my output.
But of course, as we’ve established, the pages for the most part contain shit. And are meant to. And yet it feels like production.
How, then, to conquer this conundrum? What is the best way to use the pages to stimulate further work without being sucked into believing that they count towards your daily word count target?
Simple answer: I don’t know. But what I have tried to do recently — and it seems to be working — is that I refuse to count the 1,000 words in any adding up of a day’s work. I have a target for the day and counting only starts when I have hit the 1,000 word mark on the pages.
The best thing is that there is no temptation to skip the pages because that is now a habit and it feels as much part of getting ready for the day as brushing my teeth. It also gets my increasingly arthritic fingers moving on the keyboard and has me sitting at my desk. It’s the rather more pleasant equivalent of the daily commute.
I’m glad I’ve overcome those glitches in my process — for now, at least — because the sensible part of me realised their worth while the bitter and twisted part of me was getting increasingly resentful towards the pages.
Even when I don’t get it right and the negative feelings start to surface, at least I know what’s happening now and I can look to myself and what I’m doing rather than trying to pick holes in a practise that has proven itself to be of benefit.
And now to bed. I need to be up early to get stuck into my morning pages.
