My Morning Pages Practice

Pictured above: these are not my words, not my writing, not done in the morning

Three pages of A4 lined pages, hand written every morning without thinking, planning or hesitation, before I do anything else.

Those are my interpretation of the kind-of rules for Morning Pages, the life-changing (don't think so? try it!) writing tool prescribed by Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way.

I've been doing it for many years now (it's more than ten since I learned about the tool and I can't say I've done it every day, but every evening that I've reviewed the day and realised it didn't start with morning pages, I've wished that I had.

It's a meditative practice that doesn't necessarily get you anywhere or give you anything other than peace of mind and satisfaction that you've done it again. Then weird stuff happens as a by-product, y'know, art and stuff.

These are the things that crop up again and again in between the coherent bits of burbling brook that is the inside of my head before coffee.

The posture

I find myself remembering some way through that it's good to keep both my feet flat on the floor and my back as straight as I can while sitting. My head, I support with my left hand, leaning my left elbow on the table. I remember this posture from school, which was the first time I would have to sit and write and write interminably on lined paper in a book. That's what school used to be like for me anyway, it might be different now with all your fancy modern computers.

The handwriting styles

These are weird. After years of practice, I recognised that not only do I have different voices in my head all the time, sometimes fighting with each other, but also these voices actually have different handwriting associated with them. There's the naughty boy who wants to get finished as soon as possible with his forward leaning italic, the pompous, properly formed cursive, the odd inbetween the lines rounded printing that goes with the precocious free child. Sometimes I'll realise I'm in one or the other and try to change my mood by changing the writing style, sometimes it works, sometimes the possession is too strong.

The breaks

Then there are the moments when I suddenly realise that I've not been writing for a minute or more, the mind has taken over, paralysed the hand and I've gone off on a fancy about something that was moving too quickly or too amorphously to be captured in words on the page. I was transfixed by fantasy, turned to stone for a while. The only way out is to force my hand back down and write again.

The blah

And then there are the times when I'm bored and in a rush again and don't want to do this and so the blah di blah di blah comes out and nonsense is the written becomingness of all our sorrows. Shabbila shabbila shabbilaaah camtankanastis int presitosis cudja cudja melita crampicosta, y'know?

Well that's me. In between it does do it's job. It gets me writing, it gets me in the flow and as I wrote this morning

"from the flow cometh the grow"

Or something.