Why I Don’t Write Morning Pages (and What I Do Instead)
I was first introduced to morning pages the summer after seventh grade. I’d been accepted into a summer academy where gifted middle schoolers had a chance to live on a university campus and take a single, college-level course—a daunting academic deep-dive for precocious tweens. I took creative writing, and over the course of three grueling weeks, we thirteen-year-olds each produced a semester’s worth of output. Every single day started with a pen, a notebook, and three pages of stream of consciousness writing.
Jenn, writing something other than morning pages.
Morning pages, if you’ve never heard of them, were first suggested by writer Julia Cameron as a fundamental part of her Artist’s Way method. To do them, you sit down first thing every morning and write three longhand pages of whatever comes to mind. Cameron goes so far as to suggest never lifting the pen from the paper and simply repeating the same word or phrase over and over If you happen to get stuck for what to write next. They’re meant to be a sort of brain dump, clearing away the fog and detritus of daily living and shooing away any unhelpful thought patterns before diving into a day’s real creative work. Cameron also suggests ending each day’s writing with an affirmation. When I did them, I chose, “I am a writer” as a simple, powerful reminder to myself that I define my own identity.
That early experience with morning pages was torturous (I spent so much time cursing the professor in them that I still remember her name—Dr. Barron), but it became my model of how to be a writer, so I kept at it, picking up the practice, time and time again, throughout my creative life, sometimes using the whole of the The Artist’s Way program, and sometimes on their own. Most notably, I wrote morning pages religiously throughout the years I lived in Seattle. I had a ritual of ordering an asiago bagel and a cup of coffee and ensconcing myself at the table next to the fireplace at the Panera in Kent, Washington to scrawl my three pages before attacking my short fiction or novel-writing. Those were intensely productive writing years for me. They were also miserable. In fact, throughout my whole life, morning pages have gone hand-in-hand with depression.
I realize there may be a bit of chicken-and-egg scenario going on—it’s possible I turn to morning pages as a way of dealing with depression—but I don’t think that’s the case. In The Artist’s Way, Cameron writes, “…morning pages are often negative, frequently fragmented, often self-pitying, repetitive, styled or babyish, angry or bland—even silly sounding. Good!” She argues that putting those things on the page purges them.
I disagree. I think, especially for those of us prone to depression, writing those thoughts down gives them power.
My mother was a morning pages devotee. She filled thousands of journal pages during her lifetime. It was a rare morning that I didn’t wake up to find her with coffee at her side, rollerball gliding through line after line of her neat, Catholic-school cursive. Morning pages aren’t meant to ever be read—not by friends or family or even by yourself—but my mom left all those journals behind when she died in 2016. A friend of hers warned us, “Those journals weren’t your mom,” she said. “She used them to get everything out on paper so she didn’t take it out into the world.”
They were still all we had left of her, and my brother and I couldn’t resist. We found thousands of pages of misery. All the pain, doubt, anger, and hurt of a lifetime was bound in those volumes, and the thought of her starting every day of her life with such an outpouring was unbearable. We still couldn’t bring ourselves to destroy the journals, but we stopped reading. We split the pile and each took half. Even now, the thought of that Rubbermaid bin full of writing in my attic feels heavy, as if the sheer weight of it might one day come crashing through my ceiling, spilling out all the negativity within.
Cartoonist and author Lynda Barry describes unguided journaling as, “a hampster [sic] wheel of feelings of worry and dissatisfaction about our relationships with other people.”
For me, riding that hamster wheel was treacherous. Instead of purging the negative thoughts and revealing them for the traitors they were, the morning pages amplified them. They promoted the sort of circular thinking in which I would present a thought as truth and then, with the unceasing nature of the writing, invent justification to back up the thought’s reality. As often as not, when I was doing morning pages regularly, I started the exercise feeling all right and ended it in tears.
For a long time, I believed that was simply part of being a writer, that I needed to write out all those thoughts because otherwise, those feelings would remain festering inside me, blocking the flow of creative energy and keeping me from my full potential.
That’s bullshit. Negative thoughts aren’t mud dams that can only be broken down with a daily emotional flood. Negative thoughts are just thoughts. And if a practice regularly leaves you feeling worse than before you began, it’s not a productive practice.
Morning pages work well for a lot of people. They don’t work for me. They may or may not work for you. If, like me, you’re someone for whom stream of consciousness writing does more harm than good, here are some daily creative practices that might work better.
Meditation
Morning pages are meant to be a form of meditation, but for me, actual meditation works much better. If you’ve never tried it before, search for a guided meditation course on creativity or self-worth or compassion or patience or whatever you find yourself struggling with at the moment. I’m a big fan of Headspace. It’s been invaluable in teaching me to acknowledge thoughts and then let them go.
Lynda Barry’s Daily Diary
In her book, Syllabus, where Barry describes the journal hamster wheel, she suggests an alternative. It involves dividing the page into four sections: did, saw, heard, drawn. Each section is filled with a short list (or in the case of “drawn”, a sketch). This practice is great for honing your powers of observation and encouraging yourself to stay present and aware of the current moment.
Listmaking
Gratitude lists are proven happiness boosters. When my son was young, we used to end each day by asking for “three good things,” and it turned out to be a great way for the whole family to look to the positive.
For the whole year of 2020, I kept a “joy” list. It helped me to notice all the small, wonderful things that otherwise would have escaped me during that awful year.
Even a to-do list or grocery list can be useful, clearing your mind of the “must remembers” and making space for creativity.
Guided Journaling
For me, writing to a specific question goes a long way toward keeping me pointed toward finding solutions to whatever problem I’m trying to solve or block I’m trying to clear, be it setting long-term goals or untangling a sticky plot issue. You can do this on your own, simply by starting your writing with the question you’re trying to answer and stopping once you’ve thoroughly explored your thoughts on it. You can also seek out pointed and useful prompts from trusted sources. I took one of business coach Jen Carrington’s seasonal guided writing classes and found it to be just what I needed at the time—specific questions that helped me hone in on my needs and goals in a gentle, positive way.
Though certain creative practices may seem to be universally lauded, that doesn’t mean they’ll work for you. Morning pages aren’t good for me, but there are so many alternative routes to the same end. Try everything, take what feels best, and set the rest aside. Don’t feel compelled to continue doing something simply because everyone says you should. Your creative practice is yours alone. Do what works.
