Vol 7. The New Morning Pages

Are morning pages truly the magical cure for all blocked artists?

Looking for a one-of-a-kind piece of art for your home or as a gift? My studio sale is going on now through November 15, with original watercolor paintings on offer. Check it out here. Now, on to today’s post!

Every weekday morning, I wake up at 5:30 so that I can squeeze in twenty minutes of time with my sketchbook before getting ready for work. Often I post my morning progress on my Instagram stories. The other day, noticing my habit, my novelist-friend replied, “Is this the new morning pages?”

“I think it is,” I replied.

***

I first encountered Morning Pages and the work of Julia Cameron in 2008 through her book, The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Size. Back then I was still recovering from the obsessive dieting that dominated my life in my late teens to mid-twenties (which I talked about a little back in Vol. 3). I had already read everything by Geneen Roth and as such I no longer believed diets work, but I also didn’t think Roth’s guidelines for eating would prevent me from gaining weight. This was also the moment in my life when I was trying desperately to be a writer. I wrote poetry and short stories and was working on a manuscript of a novel.

Enter Julia Cameron with her promise that I could use writing to stay thin. Brilliant! I could work on my career aspirations and fit into my jeans. I was all in.

As I recall it, all I had to do to follow the writing diet was to adopt Cameron’s habit of morning pages. At a remove of fifteen years, I remember no other advice from that book. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t any. It was all so simple: Write three pages, longhand, every morning before doing anything else.

If you’re a writer or artist and you’ve been at your craft for any amount of time, you are undoubtedly familiar with morning pages. The Artist’s Way is a trailblazing classic of getting unstuck, and for good reason. Cameron’s advice to artists is relatable and compelling. Since my first encounter with her work through a diet book, I have read The Artists’s Way and The Sound of Paper, and I have found them reassuring and encouraging. That said, when I reread The Artist’s Way this fall, I found myself feeling skeptical of the hype around morning pages.

Cameron’s promise that they will work for you no matter what was frankly off-putting. If there were really one magical way to unlock creativity that worked for every single person, we wouldn’t need to spend so much time thinking about how to live our most fulfilling creative lives. To be honest, as I read Cameron’s description of morning pages, the extreme self-focus she recommends for this morning writing ritual felt outdated.

Happiness science tells us that focusing on ourselves actually doesn’t make us happier. But it does make us self-obsessed. And as for the idea of morning pages as catharsis—getting all those distracting thoughts out of your head and onto the page to clear up mental and emotional space—it can work, but also, if you’re a ruminator like me, it can backfire. What if, for some of us, morning pages actually get in the way of creativity?

Now, I know loads of people swear by morning pages. I know morning pages work for some people. And this post might not be for those people. Rather, this post is for people who, like me, have struggled with morning pages and have maybe even found themselves feeling deficient when the supposed magic of morning pages didn’t materialize.

One of the first things every teacher learns is that you should never tell students something is “easy” because then if some students find it hard, those students will feel personally deficient. That’s kind of how I felt reading Cameron’s insistence that morning pages would definitely work for me.

Here’s the thing: I did morning pages. For literally years. I have a shelf of Moleskine notebooks full of morning pages from my late twenties and thirties. I have no idea if this habit prevented me from gaining weight as promised by The Writing Diet, and I have no idea if it helped my creativity. I have stayed just about the same size throughout adulthood, and I did manage to write a couple of novels in my morning-pages years, it’s true, but correlation does not equal causation.

What I know about the time frame in which I was keeping morning pages is that I was often unhappy. As I mentioned above, I am a ruminator. I get stuck in my thought patterns and spend a lot of mental energy chewing on the same thoughts endlessly. Starting my day with “cathartic” morning pages effectively meant I was not so much pouring out what was in my mind as I was starting my internal ticker tape for the day. After I wrote my pages and closed my journal, I did not walk away with a peaceful demeanor and loads of creative energy. I wrote stuff down and spent the rest of the day mentally revising it in my mind.

Eventually, I stopped keeping morning pages. My life was getting busier, and even though I was managing morning pages almost every day, I wasn’t always doing the “real” writing that I wanted to do. I began to feel that when I was awake early enough to write, my time would be better spent working on my fiction than whining about whatever petty complaint I had at the moment. Did I really need to clear my head with three longhand pages of dribble just so I could be creative?

The answer, it turns out, is no. I am a morning person. I function very well in the morning and I like to use the morning for creative activities. I found I could skip morning pages and go directly to morning creative writing. And my days were happier because I was consistently doing something I loved instead of dwelling on my problems. I know morning pages don’t have to be about problems, by the way, but also, let’s face it, they are often the home of complaints, rants, and pity parties.

Lately, I haven’t been writing in the morning because, as I mentioned at the start of this post, I have been painting. At some point in the past few years, I stopped wanting to wake up early to write, but I had no trouble setting my alarm if it meant time to paint. I’m following joy these days, and joy for me is painting.

So allow me to propose the New Morning Pages: Twenty minutes, first thing each day, for whatever brings you joy. Maybe it’s writing. Maybe it’s painting. Maybe it’s taking a walk. What makes you want to leap out of bed in the morning? Can you do that thing before your busy day gets underway? Give it a try! Maybe it’ll be magic…

If you want to see some of my New Morning Pages, you can find a highlight on my Instagram profile. I’m sharing my work most days with the hashtag #thenewmorningpages, which you can use, too, if you’re so inclined. Cheers!

What’s your take on morning pages?

Are you a fan? Are you a skeptic? Do you have a morning routine that brings you joy? Share in the comments! I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Studio News

If you’d like a glimpse of what I’ve been up to in my studio lately, here’s a YouTube video I made to record the process of a recent painting. I’ve been trying to be more expressive, and so one technique I’ve been experimenting with is painting before I do any line drawing.

This was a direct development from the Fall #20for20ArtChallenge for Fall 2023. After using pre-toned pages, I wondered how it might feel to create an underpainting specifically for the image I had chosen, instead of doing random underpaintings and then choosing references around them.

Both exercises (pre-toned pages and painting before drawing) have been excellent for helping me develop observational skills. Do you use either of these methods? I’d love to see your work and hear about your process!