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Posts from the ‘Morning Pages’ Category

Jun 4

Time for morning pages!

I’ve written a lot about morning pages. I include them as a practice in the modules I teach, and I use them myself in a lot of different ways. But – what are they? And how do they work?

At the most basic level, morning pages are three pages of longhand – or 750 words on a laptop – free writing. They are not high art. They are not even ‘writing’. They are containers for anything and everything that crosses your mind. There is no wrong way to do them – and they are for your eyes only.

Morning pages are a system started by Dorothea Brande in her 1934 bestseller, Becoming a Writer, later revived by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. Both Brande and Cameron have strong ideas about what they should and should not be. Both advocate doing morning pages as early as you can manage them: Cameron insists that they be done by hand, while Brande is happy for them to be done by typewriter to help a writer build up stamina and increase output. I do them online at 750words.com – and have been doing so for more than 10 years now. The only real “rule” is to keep your hand moving. Try not to stop. Don’t think too hard about what you’re writing – you’re trying to access different ways of thinking – and definitely don’t stop to edit or rewrite. Morning pages are about generating new material – it can be polished later, if you like.

The best way to learn what they are – and what they can be for you – is to do them. After all, they are a practice, not a theory. They are done in the doing, not the planning. During the pandemic, I ran some creative workouts on social media, hoping to encourage people to experiment with writing in new ways. One such way was to consider how morning pages might benefit a writing practice as well as wellbeing. Here are some of the ways that I use morning pages. Maybe they can work for you?

FREE WRITE: Open a journal and a document and just write down whatever comes to mind. Don’t stop to think or censor. Sometimes we don’t know what we think until we can see what we say.

I AM: Sometimes prompts can get this writing going. They can be as simple as these: I am… I’m not… I want… I don’t want… I know… I don’t know… I feel… I don’t feel…
They can be time specific: Today I… Yesterday I… Tomorrow I…
All you need to add are simple nouns and verbs. Today I am… Yesterday I felt… Tomorrow I want…
From there, you can go anywhere – but if you ever feel stuck or run out of steam, you just circle back to the same prompt and begin again. What else is there to say? What else are you?

BRAIN DUMP: Is your brain full? Yeah, me too – sometimes. We all get busy heads – and living through a pandemic hasn’t helped. Morning pages are a great place to set down burdens. They are a container big enough and flexible enough to hold all our thoughts and feelings. Sometimes if we write things down, we can convince our brains that we are listening to them and taking their concerns seriously. After all, their job is to protect us. It isn’t their fault if they’re hyper-vigilant, scanning the world for danger. It isn’t our fault either. If your brain is full of chatter, see if you can empty it into morning pages.

ROOTING: Sometimes our heads are so full, they’re in a spin. We don’t know if we’re coming or going, whether we’re projecting forward in worrying or backward in regret. Morning pages can root us in the now. Centre yourselves in time and space, wherever you are. Write yourself into place, using all your senses.
What can you see? Describe it: colour, texture, shape and size. Lift your head – what else can you see?
What can you hear, beyond the sound of your own hand on the page or the keys? What small sounds are near you that you’ve stopped hearing? What can you hear far away? How far? What can’t you hear?
What can you smell? Does anything have a smell around you? Can you smell yourself – or does everything still smell of sanitiser? Maybe find something that can smell, so you have something to describe.
What can you taste? (Morning pages require big cups of tea, in my opinion!).
Lastly, what can you touch? Focus on the pressure between your hands and your words, the contact of your body with your writing: pen or keyboard. Plant your feet and feel how the ground supports you, holds you up. Sit back, aware of the contact between your body and the chair and floor. Feel how supported you are.
Touch also relates to what touches us. How do we feel in our clothing? How do we feel in our skin? Is there tightness or looseness? Where are the places we are feeling? Touch also refers to pressure, temperature, and sensations. How are you feeling? No, really. How are you really feeling?

LISTING: Who doesn’t love a list? Sometimes my morning pages are to-do lists. Often, they start out that way, so that I can clear my head of whatever it is I’m worrying about or afraid that I’ll forget. From there, I might examine the list to break it down into smaller steps or maybe to write about my priorities, what feels in balance and what does not. Sometimes I make larger, more intentional lists that might form long-term plans. What do I want to achieve this week or month or season? How do I want to feel? What am I not doing enough of? What would I really like to do? See if you can list 10 things – and then another 10.

PLANNING: When I’m low on time, I use morning pages as a planner, to lay out longer projects or to sketch out scenes. It means that, when you do have time to write, you’ll find you’ve already laid the groundwork out to get you started. No more blank page! You can read more about this process here:

CREATIVE PROMPTS: Where do ideas come from? Here is where morning pages get fun. After all, maybe you don’t want to start your mornings going over old ground or making laundry lists. Morning pages can be a creative space to start new pieces or projects through simple, one line fire-starters that can spark ideas.
Remember that you can always change tense and POV. If you always write in first person (I), work with second (you) or collective third (they). Here are some quick lines to get you going:

It was in the corner.
She wasn’t expecting that.
We could see it from here.
You hold it in your hand.
It had never been so cold.
Look out!

You can keep a jar of words or prompts that you find useful. Try first lines or last lines of novels or stories. The first whole sentence on page 100 of a novel is also usually pretty good. You can also find one through bibliomancy: open a book at random and find a sentence to use. Prefer a visual prompt? I have a Pinterest board for that: You can always Google “writing prompts” to find a million more – or visit storyaday.org.

I’ll be running a morning pages workout later in the summer. If you want to join in, sign up to the blog here or follow me on Twitter: @Peggy_Riley – Until then, whatever gets you writing – keep writing!

Oct 9

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Morning pages thoughts…

I want to write, but I don’t know why sometimes. I lose track of it. The world gets busy and I get in a spin. My mind chases solutions. I tell myself if I can only clear the decks first – get rid of this task, clear the items on the to-do list, that I will have the clarity to write. I tell myself this a lot. The fact of the matter is that every time I clear the decks they manage to fill themselves. A gust of wind from the world blows to-do leaves straight back on. The list gets ever longer. There is always something that needs doing. There is always something or someone who will call for our attention. How to find balance in this?
Some days, I spend all day trying to clear the decks, and find at the end of it that there is not enough time left for me. Or if there is time, that I feel spent. I am spent. There is no clarity then, even with the tasks all marked to done. There is only a ragged tiredness and the sad, slow feeling that I have let myself down somehow, particularly on a day spent trying not to let others down and trying not to let myself down where others are concerned.
There are times when I tell myself I will write first. I will attend to my needs before anyone else’s – other than the dog’s, obviously, who has no need for writing – how can that fill his dish? I tell myself that I will begin as I mean to go on – and sometimes I do. For days in a row I can start with my own work, particularly when it is already formed. Particularly when I am clear about the way forward with it, when I can see it already as the thing it is or will be.
What comes harder is the early work, the dream-state I need to be in to see the strange and tenuous links that will make something new from my questions, my desires, my research, my worries, my reading. This is, of course, what morning pages are designed to capture – and they do a good job of it, if I can keep my pages from straying into to-do list terrain.
During the pandemic, when the work load kept increasing, I began to write at the ends of days, as the emails were slowing, as the days were still long and bright. It was easy to keep working in the spring and summer when the nights were far away. Now it is autumn and the nights are drawing in. I stumble home from my writing shed in the dark. In this method, I can squeeze another couple of hours into my writing day – but the energy is different at the end than the beginning. Here, I use morning pages to draw a line under the work and try to give myself a fresh start, turning the page from one aspect of myself to another. It works well, but is there clarity? Sometimes. Sometimes there is just relief and exhaustion and another sad, slow feeling of regret. Is this how I spend my days?
How we spend our lives is, of course, how we spend our days. And we have a lot of demands on our time. We carve our precious 24 hours and 52 weeks into smaller and smaller parcels of time to be spent or sold or saved. It changes how we use our time, but it can’t make more of it. We can’t plant time-seeds. Or maybe we can. Maybe we can use the creative time we have, trying to figure out how to make more of it. I would like to.
There are days when this is all the time I have to write. These words. These morning pages. I can rattle through them in 12 minutes – 10 minutes at a pinch. Or I can savour them, as I did this morning. I can look up between paragraphs or phrases. Notice the sun through the window, how it casts shadows in triangles across the shed. Notice how the sunflowers are drooping. Notice that the tree I planted when my dog was a puppy is already turning orange. It is autumn, and I am in danger of missing it.
Maybe these pauses in morning pages can plant time-seeds. I notice time is passing. I check in with my old desires. Another season is coming. Will this be one in which I’m able to find more balance? Will this be one in which I save a little bit more time for me, like a seed I can still plant?

Aug 27

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Morning pages and writing for the long haul

I’ve been talking about morning pages on Twitter all month, and some days it makes for long threads. Yesterday’s was particularly long, and I know today will be long as well, so I’m parking the content here instead. On Twitter, I’ve talked about “how” we might do morning pages as well as “why”; I’ve offered lots of ways in to the practice and given prompts for how to use them more creatively, to generate and develop new ideas. Morning pages are a big part of my writing life, particularly when I’m working on long-form projects – work you have to try to sustain over months. And sometimes it can be hard to keep a piece of writing going, particularly when your life and your head are very busy. So I’m particularly invested in this process of using morning pages to break long-form writing down into morning-sized chunks, because it’s how I’m going to have to work for a little while. Maybe it’s how you’ll have to work too, once we turn the page into September and new sets of priorities and challenges beckon.

Here’s what I do. As I start a project – or another draft – I use one set of morning pages to tell myself the story. I just type out what happens, however much or little I know at the time. In a first draft, I might just be telling myself what the big story is – who my characters are and what they want and what happens to them to make them respond – to change. (I try to remember to focus on how the story develops “because” something happened, rather than just “and then this happens. Once I’ve written that very rough version of what I think the story is, I cut and paste it into a new document. I use Scrivener, but you might use anything else you prefer.

Whenever I have the headspace, I start to break that story down into smaller chunks – scenes, if you will. This is easy to navigate in Scrivener, as you can have as many documents in a folder as you like – and it’s an easy place to cut and paste into – but Word will work as well. From that scrappy document, I use morning pages to approach each chunk, each scene, one morning (or whenever I can manage it) at a time. In 750 words I can flesh each scene or each idea out, cut and paste it into its own new document, and get on with my to-do list and whatever the day requires. Later – or when I have headspace – I open the scene and find what feels like a very rough draft or a treatment of a scene, but it’s enough to get me writing – to flesh it out, to finish it off. Those first 750 words might be scene setting, using sensory details that I think are there but also ones that affect me as I’m writing, but there’s usually emotional temperature there as well. I’m usually writing with a sense of where characters have been and where they need to get to. This also means that, in a first draft anyway, I don’t have to work logically or in a linear fashion. I can jump around. And sometimes that jumping imposes itself on the structure of the story I’ll tell – in a good way – as I’m following the heat.

To the right is a screenshot of how my scenes look in their binder in the first draft. Right now, I’m rewriting a rough first draft banged out during lockdown. I am looking at the structure and order of what I wrote and jettisoning a lot that I don’t like. That’s OK. I’m approaching the rewrite in morning pages, telling myself the story again, as it has evolved, and then I start the process again in Scrivener, breaking the story into bite-sized scene-chunks, using a print out from my rough first draft as a guide for setting, time, emotional temperature etc., but writing with a clearer sense of what’s going on and what’s at stake. Building on these little steps of words means I rarely face a blank page and it reassures me that I am making progress, even when it feels slow. It will organise my thoughts and what I have to accomplish, with a goal to finish the rewrite by the end of half-term. Can I do it? Watch this space, as they say.

If you struggle to stay on top of longer projects, why not change your tools? Using software, time, planning and morning pages might just make a difference. Whatever keeps you writing – write on.

Aug 18

Morning pages prompts

This week on Twitter, I’ve been talking about how morning pages can be used creatively. Using prompts and sets of words that you wouldn’t ordinarily reach for can help your writing move in new directions. This can be especially welcome when it feels like our own words are stuck in a rut or repeatedly circling old issues.

We use this same practice in workshops, introducing simple, open prompts – such as “I could see it from here” or “it had never been so cold” – to get new stories started or playing a game of “word cricket”, whereby writers write as quickly as they can and “catch” words as I throw them out. (I learned this game from Vanessa Gebbie – thanks, Vanessa!).

Want to play a game of word cricket? Here are 10 words for you. Set a timer for one minute. Every time the timer goes, grab another word here. It isn’t quite like me chirping in the room with you, but in these days of social distancing, it will have to do. Let’s play!

Set a timer and start with: The door was open.

Minute one: Fox

Minute two: Mirror

Minute three: Shoe

Minute four: Candle

Minute five: Knife

Minute six: River

Minute seven: Milk

Minute eight: Key

Minute nine: Moon

Minute ten: Window

How do the words work? Did they take you in any new directions? They may have been the kinds of words you would ordinarily reach for – or they may have been an unusual set. I like them because they’re simple nouns that can also (many of them) work as verbs. Maybe you played around with them and used them as you saw fit – I hope you did. Prompts are only there to be played with. If this system works for you, you might make a jar of words to guide you – which is something friend and author Claire King does.

If you like the idea of using morning pages more creatively, come find me on Twitter @Peggy_Riley – tomorrow there will be new ideas!

Aug 12

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Morning Pages

Over on Twitter, I’ve been inviting people to experiment with morning pages and to consider how they might work for them. There are daily prompts looking at “how” to do morning pages – when and where, how often and how long. (Hint: there are no rules except for maybe this one from Natalie Goldberg. Keep your hand moving.) Dorothea Brande did her pages on the typewriter, Julia Cameron does hers longhand, and I rattle them out online at 750words.com – there are no rules.

Screenshots from Twitter

This week, we’ve been talking about “why” we do morning pages, how they work to make a bit of room in a busy head. Because it is hot – so hot – many of us aren’t sleeping, and sometimes dark unsleeps become opportunities for self-torment, for me. On waking, I feel brittle. All resilience is gone. And on these days, I need morning pages all the more to talk myself around.

Next week, I’ll be moving on to creative applications for morning pages. If you’re particularly worried about morning pages being nothing more than naval-gazing, this week might be for you. (But I say, what’s wrong with naval-gazing? Who else is going to look at it with such curiosity and compassion?)

Do you do morning pages? What works for you – and what doesn’t? And if you haven’t tried them, what would help you to start?

Oct 31

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A Million Words

There seems to be no agreement on which author first said a writer had to write their “first million words” before they were really ready to write. Some attribute it to Ray Bradbury, while others cite Elmore Leonard namechecking John D. McDonald. I was certain it was Kurt Vonnegut, because he gives so much good advice. Whoever said it, I’m happy to reach my own million-word milestone. While I might not count them, draft after draft, I have proof of them in the form of morning pages: a million words, typed over my first cup of tea. Want your own badge? Join in at 750words.com. As for me, I’ll see you in the morning – doing pages!


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