Morning Pages

Long before I’d ever heard of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, I was doing “morning pages” but never felt any catharsis or development as a result of my efforts. It felt like my pages were more of a laundry list of what went right or wrong during the day. More like Jefferson’s Farm Book than the elegant musings of a “real writer”. The memoirs I did read, like Out of Africa or This House of Sky, were as far out of reach as The Great Gatsby or any other work of literature. There was no bridge from my scratchings to those. And yet . . .

. . . every writer’s way is different.

For me, the greatest enemy is the blank page. Putting something down, anything down, is a start. It’s something you learn fast as a “production” writer with a deadline. That press release that needs to get out before 2 pm Pacific? Draft something. Let it sit for five minutes. Revise. Get a cup of coffee. Revise again. At 1:55 pm, accept that it is as good as it gets and it’s never intended to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning work. That white paper on grid-scale renewable generation? Distill your mountain of research and interview notes to a 3-page outline and offer it up to the review team for dissection. And they will dissect. And you will revise, once, twice, as many times as it takes. Because the outline is the roadmap to the finished work and once the outline is its best, the writing becomes more like connecting dots and less like creating new from whole cloth. For superior B2B writing or technology transfer writing, this is a proven, effective process.

Working as a creative writer is not that different. You come to the blank page and put something down. If it is Hemingway’s “one true sentence” all the better. But most of the time it may simply be as Henry Miller observed, “When you can’t create you can work.”  

So, it’s ok if morning pages—for me—are like taking out the garbage. It’s a way of cleansing my mind so it can focus on the real work.

Enjoy these weekly musings? Subscribe for email delivery: