On Morning Pages

The value and pitfalls of a daily writing practice.

Photo by Nora Carol.

---

It was January 1st, 2023, and I had big plans. Who doesn’t, on the first of the year? As the old year drew to a close, I had looked back over the previous twelve months and thought about what had and hadn’t worked for me—on a lot of levels. Like most people, I imagine, there were things that were great, and other things that really weren’t. One of the things that stood out to me was how good it felt when I took the time to sit down and write about nothing in particular. It felt good to do it, and even better when I realized that what I wrote during these sessions was—and this shocked me—some of my best work. Okay, maybe not my best-best work, but it was crossing into territory I found exciting. I was experimenting. I was honest. I myself found it compelling to the point that it didn’t matter to me what other people thought. I decided, right then and there, that I wanted to commit to writing every day for the next year.

I write for a living, and so I write most days anyway, but still there was something about writing purely for the sake of writing that felt different. There is a lot that goes into writing that doesn’t actually involve the specific act of putting sentences down on the page. Even without taking into consideration things like admin or the realities of running a Substack—with journalism, topical essays, and narrative nonfiction in particular, there are a lot of other components that you have to pull in. There are interviews, and hours spent in archives, and online research, and fact checking, and a million other things. Then you have to organize it all, and sometimes translate it, and think through your story beats. Even when I was writing, I wasn’t always writing-writing. If I hit a period of weeks when sentence crafting wasn’t on the agenda, it was easy to fall out of practice.

There is an adage I’ve heard used by parents of young children, that “sleep begets sleep,” meaning that a baby who is well-rested during the day will also have an easier time falling asleep at night. This can also be true for adults. If you’re over-tired, it can actually make your insomnia worse. Similarly, I have come to believe that writing begets writing, in that the more you write, the easier writing becomes. Perhaps that sounds obvious, but there are certainly divergent opinions on this. If a student or a friend feels like they’re blocked, I usually recommend writing something other than the thing they’re blocked on—fan fiction, an angry screed, anything at all—just to get the gears moving again. It may not work for everyone, but regardless, many writers do believe in the power of writing something every day, no matter what. A common form this takes is a practice called “morning pages.”

I first started writing morning pages back in 2005 or so, after rediscovering Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Morning pages are one of the foundations of her program, along with things like taking yourself out on weekly “artist dates,” and creating a sense of abundance through small acts of care and indulgence. The idea with morning pages is that you write three pages longhand, stream-of-consciousness style, first thing in the morning. You roll out of bed, put pen to paper, and go.

I was primed to accept this practice, since my college writing mentor, Mary Oliver, always stressed the importance of a daily writing “appointment.” (I know, I mention her a lot, but her teaching had a big influence on how I write and teach; it can’t be avoided.)

In the years after my college graduation, however, I stopped writing poems. I stopped making appointments to write things that could turn into poems, and so poems had stopped landing on me. That is how it used to feel—that poems landed on me, as I walked around, going about my day—or at least they used to. I wasn’t sure I was a young poet anymore, but I did still seem to be a writer of some kind. I wrote, or I tried to. I went to journalism school. After a while, I opened up The Artist’s Way again, and started writing morning pages. Cameron has described it as being akin to “a tiny whisk-broom that dislodges dust from every corner of our life,” and it worked for me, I think, on that level, at least for a while. But the problem with my morning pages and that act of “sweeping out” is that what I tended to be left with in the end was just that: mental dust.

In Cameron’s defense, morning pages are not really meant to produce shareable prose. On the contrary, it’s a private exercise, intended to clean out your mind and encourage the habit of putting your thoughts and feelings into words. They are almost as popular in self-help circles as they are with writers looking to hone their craft. It’s an opportunity to get out of your own way. After all, The Artist’s Way is not strictly a writing manual, but rather a “spiritual path to higher creativity.” It’s right there in the subtitle.

I maintained a practice of morning pages—which one could also just call journaling, I suppose, usually first thing in the morning—on and off for years. I would try to write three pages on whatever came to mind, or vent my concerns, just to “get it out of the way.” It wasn’t quite a diary, but there were diaristic elements. I wrote about the things that were happening. If I ever went back and read through old entries, there were certainly nuggets of observation and description that were usable there, so to speak, that might get shined up and repurposed for a new life elsewhere, in a book or an essay. But most of the time, however, the act of re-reading them was just…stressful. They had been a repository for my quotidian anxieties, and so when I revisited them, anxiety is what I found.

Many years ago, I attended a workshop with the poet Marie Howe, and this is an assignment she likes to give:

“Write two lines about what you saw this morning, without using any metaphors. For example: ‘I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places.’”

In an interview with Krista Tippet for the On Being podcast, she explains it further:

“To resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.”

“It does,” Tippet agrees.

Howe confirms: “It hurts us.”

In the interview, Howe said she likes to ask her students to write down ten observations from the actual world, like that water glass on a brown tablecloth, and remarked that it’s always very hard for them. To observe the world, you have to be present in the world, and a writer must do this in a way that is quite painful for most people. It hurts to be present. It is very hard.

In 2017, after reviewing yet another completed Moleskine journal inadvertently filled with all the worries I had wanted to throw away, I realized that morning pages were not working for me. They were not good for me. Perhaps they were not for me at all.

Again, Cameron herself says that they aren’t meant to be read—ever—even by you, but there I was, yet again, reading them. It’s not like I threw them away or burned them. I always read them eventually. I obviously wanted them to be a diary, some record of my life and my observations as a writer. In the end, however, that just wasn’t what they were. Encouraged by Cameron to get the negative stuff “out of the way,” to sweep it out with that little whisk-broom, I had instead collected and preserved it. It wasn’t truly awful, since even in my darkest moments I still find that beauty at least has a way of breaking through, but it wasn’t great. It made me feel sick. It wasn’t a portrait of my life, but rather its shadow side. It did not feel like writing to me in a serious way, and was not useful as a record of my life. So, I decided to quit.

The writer Jennifer Tatroe has also written about quitting the practice of morning pages.

“Throughout my whole life, morning pages have gone hand-in-hand with depression,” she said.

When her mother, who was also a morning pages devotee, died in 2016, she left behind a cache of journals that amounted to “thousands of pages of misery.” The process of reading them—too tempting to pass up in her state of loss and grief—was unbearable. Even though she knew that these entries were the emotional detritus her mother had wanted to clear away, and not her true self, it was still difficult to contemplate. She came to the conclusion that the morning pages themselves might actually be reinforcing such negative thoughts—giving them power by putting them into words, rather than clearing them away. She quotes the cartoonist and author Lynda Barry, who said that unstructured journaling can easily become “like a hamster wheel of feelings of worry and dissatisfaction about our relationships with other people.” The faster we run, and the more we write about it, the faster that wheel of worry spins.

This won’t be true for everyone, of course. Many, many people—whether they identify as writers or not—love to write morning pages, and they get a lot out of them. They have a daily appointment with themselves, or their creativity, which the practice of morning pages helps facilitate, and it feels good to keep it. As Marie Howe observed, to be present in the world is hard, especially for writers, and yet to be a good writer, being present is a prerequisite. The question then becomes: do morning pages help you to be present, and to clear away the cobwebs, or are they doing something else?

After I quit journaling, I did feel like something was missing. I missed that appointment, that commitment of putting words down on the page that weren’t trying to become anything in particular. I still wrote down stray thoughts and observations, of course, and sometimes these gathered steam and became essays or fragments of essays. When I moved to Paris in the middle of 2019, I carried a little notebook around with me in my purse, where I jotted down stray sentences. Looking back through that notebook now, some of those sentences are interesting, and some nonsensical, illegible, but many of the better ones went into the book I’d been writing. Still, I wanted something more.

In late 2020, I came up with my version of the Five Things Essay, or the five things prompt. I was not consciously thinking of Mary Oliver or Marie Howe when I first did this, but I have since realized that of course it draws strongly from their advice. I had simply adapted it to the work of an essayist. It certainly had more to do with what I had learned about writing poems from these great poets than it does from Cameron’s morning pages. It is a way to keep Mary’s writing appointment, and incorporates Marie’s advice about observation.

Because I am not writing poems, or mostly not, I don’t worry so much about avoiding the crutch of metaphor. The entries are structured, with the five numbered beginnings, the five trains of thought to pursue. I have a rule that I cannot “vent.” Things that you might find on a to-do list are strictly forbidden. As much as possible, I stick with the things I have seen in the real world: the light breaking through the window over the buildings across the way, the gray-haired prostitutes in their fur coats standing along the rue Saint-Denis in winter, the way the air smelled in Lahore, in 2001, in the courtyard of the Badshahi Mosque, after a burst of summer rain. My worries are not invited. I turn the lens outward, not in. This keeps me focused on observation and out of my own head.

After two years of working sporadically with this method, I decided to commit to doing it every day. Excited by the idea of showing up for myself like that, I got very intense about it at first. I wrote myself a deranged little pep talk: You have to do it, even if you’re dead. Sick? Traveling? Getting divorced? Having the worst day of your life? Somebody died? It doesn’t matter! You still have to write five things! I was thinking of the “vow hours” they sometimes do on residential Buddhist meditation retreats, which I have attended, where you vow not to move a muscle for the whole hour of meditation, no matter what. Your body can basically burst into flames with pain, and still you don’t move. A mosquito and his whole family can enjoy a buffet on your face. You might need to blow your nose but can’t, and so the snot pours down your lips and over your chin and onto your lap, and it doesn’t matter. You have committed to not moving and so you do not move. “It is about PRIORITIZING YOURSELF and PRIORITIZING YOUR WRITING,” I wrote to myself in all caps, derangedly.

I must confess to you now: I did not write a Five Things draft every day since January 1st of 2023 like I promised I would, or for the rest of that year, but I did do it most days. For the first six months, I did it a little over 80% of the time, while in the second half of the year, as life got more complicated, that percentage fell. Still, more days than not, I showed up. I felt better when I did it. For me, it was the solution—a structured way to keep an almost-daily journal that avoided the usual pitfalls of the worrying hamster wheel.

I was often surprised by how much I liked the entries when I went back to read them later. Sometimes I didn’t even remember writing them. What I thought was boring or stupid at the time would often turn out to be poignant, true, and even interesting—at least to me. There were many places to start, and many threads to follow. In the first three and a half months of the project, I wrote over 40,000 words from the exercises alone. On the days when I really and truly had nothing to say, or no time at all to say it, I simply took a few minutes and wrote down a word, or a handful of words, per number, to show myself that I had showed up. I was there. No matter how brief, I still kept the appointment. And you know what? Even these brief entries were often meaningful, too.

Later, after my first year of re-working the concept of morning pages in this way, I decided that I did still need a bit of that whisk broom after all. So I added something I called my “inventory.” Every week, or every month, or whenever I felt I needed it, I would sit down to write in a way that was very much about to-do lists and venting. Because apparently I still enjoy structure and a constraint even when it comes to the loosest forms of writing, I would organize these journaling free-for-alls by category: the body (and all the ways I care for and sustain it, including clothes and the home), my emotions and personal life, my creative self, my professional life, logistics and responsibilities, etc.. It was a way to check in and take stock. I started at the center—as a person in a body—and then moved outward. I would check in with myself about each category and then move on to the next. How was I feeling? What was happening? At the end, I would come up with a to-do list for each one: things I needed to pick up at the pharmacy, friends I wanted to call, appointments I needed to make, etc. When it came time to do the next inventory, I would first read through the previous one and write a short summary: “Last week I was feeling…” etc. I noticed what had changed, or what hadn’t. Somehow, this too helped to keep things grounded.

Since I had given myself a creative outlet for my writing through a different daily (or almost daily) practice, that creativity wasn’t struggling to break through the noise of quotidian stress about life the way it used to. For me at least, having an inventory journal like this, where I helped myself remember to buy milk and call my doctor (or at least ideally I do) in addition to sweeping out my other worries, filled in any gaps not covered by a more structured creative writing practice based on memory and observation. I learned that I wanted to separate the act of writing-as-therapy/organization from writing-as-art, and found that both practices were better because of it.

So what about you? Do you write morning pages, or have another daily writing practice? What works for you and what doesn’t?

Let me know in the comments.

---

This essay was adapted and expanded from a post originally shared in 2023.

---

Enjoy my writing and want to support it? Become a paid subscriber today. You’ll get full access to craft talks, essays, notebook entries, sketchbook pages, and the popular semiannual write-along workshop Essay Camp. You can also buy my books The Oyster War and High Heel, “like” my posts by tapping the heart icon, share them on Substack Notes or other social media, and/or send them to a friend.