Posts tagged ‘Morning Pages’

Time for morning pages!

Last week, I had the opportunity to run a series of morning writing workshops for Whitstable Wellness Week. In these workshops, we wrote, we talked about writing, and we looked at all the ways that morning pages can work for writers. I think a lot about writing and morning pages. In fact, I’m thinking about morning pages this morning, while I write my own morning pages, writing my way into the day.
What are morning pages? They’re an idea introduced by Dorothea Brande in Becoming a Writer in 1934 and re-introduced by Julia Cameron in her transformative The Artist’s Way. But the form might be ancient, of course – any time a writer sits down to write with intent in the morning can be considered some kind of morning pages. Brande asks that we wake through the writing, that we reach for pen and paper (or in her case, typewriter) as early as possible, so that we can begin writing before we are fully awake and before the editor in our heads can wake up and tell us the writing’s no good.  Aim for 3 pages in a notebook – or 750 words.  What words?  Brande suggests it doesn’t matter:  you are aiming for “quantity, not quality”.  You are simply filling the pages to train your mind and hand that you are in control of when writing happens – no muse awaits you, no editor can stop you.
In this rapid writing, we are able to come to terms with what we think, as we have written it, and how we feel, as we might not yet have been able to express. New thoughts and feelings, memories and impressions bubble up to the surface, summoned. Somehow between the lists of worries and plans and concerns and intentions, there is always something that seems to come of its own accord, a glimmer of something that hints at something new – a new way forward, a fresh approach, an unexpected connection. We write to fill the pages, to train the mind and fingers for the stamina and discipline that writing demands, but we also create the clean white page and the moment in time that allows for breakthroughs, for the work that is in our heads already to come out and show itself. Done regularly, this action becomes a ritual – and then it becomes a routine. It becomes a normal impulse, allowing a writer to set the day up through her words.  (What if you’re not a morning writer?  Even the idea of “morning” is elastic:  morning pages can begin your “writing day”, whenever that time comes.  If you’re a night writer, morning pages can draw a line under the day that has happened and create the sense of morning, as you settle in.)
I saw all kinds of breakthroughs throughout the week as writers opened their notebooks or laptops and returned to the page. In the beginning, I offered only gentle prompts to get them started – and these prompts could be returned to while writing, in case of feeling stuck or unable to write anything else. If you come back to the prompt and write it, you are always writing. And if there is any kind of “rule” about morning pages, it is that you should keep your hands moving and fill the page before you stop to think about all the reasons you might stop. We used such simple prompts as: I want/I don’t want; I think/I don’t think; I remember/I don’t remember; or Today I/yesterday I, Tomorrow I… Sometimes we wrote ourselves into the room, using all five senses to root us into time and space: what do we see; what do we hear; what do we smell; what do we taste; what can we touch/what touches us. We wrote our way through light and pressure, temperature and proximity, where we were in our bodies, in the room, the building, the town, the world. And from there, there are always new directions, tentacling out from every sense. Sometimes, writers had a story in their heads as they arrived, and they were able to write their way into their own characters, using these five senses, to root them into story-time and story-place: this can be a powerful way for a writer to slip under the skin of a character, to see the world through her eyes and to capture what she notices. And from those sensory details can come whole backstories, memories, connections and objectives. The senses point at a person who whole and formed, capable of her own thoughts and feelings – we only have to follow them and her, into a scene.
Sometimes I offered first lines, “firestarters” as writer/poet/psychogeographer Sonia Overall calls them in her workshops: some lines I pinched from her. “That was when it happened”, and “I could see the fire from there”, and “I can still see it” are the ones I like to use. Sometimes I kept throwing words out – simple nouns for writers to catch and stitch into their writing: this idea of “word cricket” was introduced by write Vanessa Gebbie in a flash fiction workshop. We also talked about how these batches of 750 words could themselves be made of dribbles and drabbles and pieces of flash fiction that might stitch into something larger, such as Sophie van Llewyn’s novella-in-flash Bottled Goods, or simply hint at new ideas that will lead to new projects. Really, the possibilities are limitless. The form of morning pages are elastic enough to contain any thought, idea or feeling: that is what they are, after all – a container. Morning pages contain – and guard – and hold our writing, our sense of selves as writers, and our desire to engage with the words.
There are morning pages workbooks and journals.  There is an online site for morning pages – which I use, 750words.com.  But really, all you need is something to write on and with, along with the determination and will to write.  If we write, we are writers.  When we tell ourselves that this time and this writing matters, that we reach for our writing at the start of the day, we reinforce the idea that our life must align itself around this desire – this urge – to write.  And maybe the universe will follow.
Whether you’re down or up, rushed or calm, so busy you can hardly see – morning pages are a fresh start – every day.  A new beginning, waiting for you.  I believe in their subtle power and have, through almost ten years of writing them, watched them enter and transform my writing life.  It was a genuine pleasure to see the idea take hold in this small, evolving group in Whitstable, and if the group is able to carry on, it will be my genuine pleasure to sit among them, reaching for words.
My next outing on the morning pages train will be at Kent Festival of Writing.  If you’re coming – see you there!

Morning Pages in Whitstable

There’s a new festival in town:  Whitstable Wellness Week runs 23 – 29 March 2019.  Whitstable Wellness Week offers creative workshops from art to dance, writing to cooking – free.  Organised by Escape to Create’s Catriona Campbell and Red Zebra, which provides social prescribing in East Kent, Whitstable Wellness Week seeks to encourage people living with physical or mental health conditions, and those who are lonely or feeling low, to try one or more creative activity during the week to see if it helps them feel better.

Every morning throughout the festival, I’ll be running a morning pages workshop at the Horsebridge, with tips and prompts to get people writing – and keep them going.  I know morning pages can help anyone to feel better!  For more information, visit Whitstable Wellness Week.  See you at the morning pages!

A new you?

These are the doldrums between Christmas and New Year, flat land that stretches between the poles that define many of our calendars.  5 days of “Chrimbo Limbo” that span the time between the frenzied, all-consuming build up to a day of food – or faith – and the tail end of the year, one which many will be happy to leave.  From our cars or sofas, from muddy woods or frozen beaches, we can feel the world turning.  Time, flying.  This is a hinge, a pause before the first new day of a new year, filled with possibility.
How can we hang onto this sense of time?  How can we use it to prepare for a new year or a fresh start without creating the feeling that we should “do more” or “be more” or “be new” somehow, which is its own kind of all-consuming frenzy?
I return to the page and the old ritual of morning pages.
I have written about morning pages before, and how to get started on them; it is a practice that continues to sustain me.  It has become a natural – and necessary – start to my day.  A space and time to shape and sharpen my thoughts before the day begins and time sweeps me away in the wake of what it wants.
Morning pages are 3 sheets of A4 (or my preferred online method at 750words.com) written without planning, editing, or censorship.  These are raw words, written faster than we can think, as we come to wakefulness.  That is their power.  It is us, when no one’s looking in a clean space that we define and refine, daily.
It is a place to flex and stretch, mentally and emotionally.  An iron for the mind,  smoothing away the wrinkles.  A meditation made with moving fingers.
These last few months of 2017, I felt too busy to think.  My mind was always scratching away in every direction, trying to make sense of tensions and disappointments, moods and missteps, conflicting bits of information and inspirations.  When I felt there was no time for morning pages, I knew that they were more essential than ever.  How else to keep some control over my own day, other than to take my first 12 minutes or so and write down how I felt, what I wanted, where I wanted to go?  Morning pages became a place to capture 750 words of my work-in-progress, before I had to turn to other projects; somedays, it was the only work I was able to do that day for myself.  Through a very season, and university term, I kept writing morning pages and using them as starting places for scenes and chapters.  Now, at this pause before a new year, I find the WIP is nearing 30K.  It will certainly be over that mark, when we toast a brand new year.
Consciously and unconsciously, 750 words sets me up for writing, however busy the day, because I have focused myself on it.  I have stated my intent.  I have set my brain on that work, as I boil the kettle, as I let out the dog, before the dash and rush to come.
In the new year, I will be teaching many mornings.  For those of you who know me, you know how jealously I guard mornings, when I feel I write at my best.  Though we aren’t always in control of our timetables, I aim to stay in control of my brain and my time, as best I can.  In the coming new year, with all its early starts and pressures, I will seek to continue my practice and share it with students, asking them to begin our day with morning pages.  I hope to introduce them to a practice and a ritual that will nurture their writing and their thinking, so that it might sustain them through their writing lives, as it does mine.  Looking for a new you?  Try an old practice.  Morning pages.
See you on the page.