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Audacity Works
Audacity Works
Morning Pages: how to do them, how to not do them, and what to do if they bore the pants off of you
Can morning pages be done in the afternoon, or even at night? Can you do them incorrectly?
Drawing from my own experiences with morning pages, a journaling exercise introduced by author Julia Cameron in her acclaimed book The Artist's Way, welcome to my soap box about the flexibility of this practice—it doesn't have to be a morning ritual for everyone, and there's absolutely no one-size-fits-all approach. We delve into my journaling adventures, from how I create an inspiring ambience for writing, to choosing a pen that sparks joy. We'll tackle the common ennui that occasionally strikes during morning pages. Uncover creative strategies to reignite your interest for this practice, from altering your writing schedule to penning letters from different perspectives— even from your own body parts.
Morning Pages as coined and described by Julia Cameron
My beautiful amazing fountain pen I never get tired of
Don't go back to sleep.
xoRachel
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Welcome to Audacity Works, a podcast inspired by and dedicated to the working artist, the creative entrepreneur and generally doing the damn thing. This exists on the premise that the world belongs to those who have the audacity to believe that their lives have value. This is for you. Welcome to Audacity Works. I am your host, rachel Strickland, and this is episode number 42, which is all about morning pages. This episode is by request from lovely Erica, who approached me at the Irish Aerial Dance Festival. Let me know she was a listener, which was wonderful, and she asked about morning pages, just wanting to know my experience with them and also what to do when they get boring. So thank you, erica, it was lovely to see you in person and let's dig into this, shall we? If I assume you've never heard of morning pages? It's journaling, it's just journaling. It's writing in a journal and it happens in the morning, calling it morning pages If you're going to follow you know the pre-prescribed morning pages was coined by Julia Cameron, who wrote the Artist's Way, and it's one of several lifelong exercises that she gives to artists and other creatives to help feed their creative life.
Speaker 1:The reason that Julia Cameron recommends doing them in the morning, specifically the first 45 minutes after you've woken up is because your defense mechanisms have not yet kicked on in the day. So you have a better chance of getting a real relationship with your mind and not just the reactionary hamster wheel that also exists in your mind. I'll put a link to the page where Julia Cameron talks about morning pages and her own sort of rules for doing it properly, and those rules include three pages must be done freehand in handwriting and must be done in the morning while alone. I have some caveats to those things. I don't think it needs to be done in the morning, mostly because some people just do not function in the morning. I've had so many audacious ones and they're like I hate this, this sucks so bad. I'm like just do it later. Do nighttime pages, call them artist pages. They don't have to be morning pages. Also, you do not need to write three pages. Sometimes you will write two sentences, sometimes you will write five pages and you could probably keep going.
Speaker 1:But trying to get to a certain point, I think, is counterproductive because it feeds this idea that you could be doing them wrong, and that's the biggest morning pages mistake I see and the biggest reason that a lot of people just don't try to do them is because they don't want to do them improperly. And that's so silly. You cannot do them improperly. And people will argue with me and be like but Rachel, all I'm doing is writing grocery lists and to-do lists. I'm like what's wrong with that? That's having a relationship with your mind. You need to know those things. Do you feel more clear afterwards? Do you feel like you're better prepared to live the rest of your day, whatever that may entail? And they're like yeah, I'm like, then you're doing them correctly, that's good. Not that they always feel good. Sometimes they really don't, and that's also part of why they're so powerful.
Speaker 1:I do do them in the morning because I'm a morning person. It's genetic. I get it from both my parents. They wake up early. They have always woken up early and had the morning time be their best time of the day, so I really think I'm genetically programmed to do the same thing. Therefore, I love morning pages. It's the best time of day for me.
Speaker 1:But if I was a night owl like Manflesh, no, I don't think that that would be a pleasant experience. I think it would feel like a chore. And if it feels like a chore, you're not going to do it because you already have, like, so many chores already. So how can you make this fun and enjoyable for you? I started doing morning pages in 2014. My God, that's almost a decade. I don't remember why I started doing them, just that I did, and then never stopped. And I have crates and crates and boxes full of notebooks and there will be many more and there is an understood law that if I die before Manflesh, he knows to have a big, big bonfire and burn them all with my friends, and if you are at that bonfire and you choose to read a page from my morning pages, you deserve all the consequences. That's all I'll say about that. So if you're thinking of starting them and you'd like some advice on how to do that in a way that's going to actually be fun, I have some ideas for you.
Speaker 1:One is to choose a place that's beautiful for you to sit. Make sure that it's comfortable, that you have everything you need. You have light, you know, have a drawer to put your notebook and your pen in, and just make that space a space that you look forward to coming and sitting in in the morning or whenever you're doing your pages. I like to do mine outside as often as I can, in spite of the oppressive heat, which I actually really love, and I'll stay outside on my little patio table as long as possible until the cold drives me inside, because to me that is the most beautiful place on earth and I like being surrounded by the trees and whatever it is that just makes you happy to be in a place. Make that space for yourself. Another thing is choosing the tools. So a beautiful notebook, or at least one that makes you smile Maybe it has a raunchy joke on the cover or something and a pen that is fun to write with doesn't have to be expensive, can just be like a nice pen. A nice pen can make all the difference.
Speaker 1:Last December for the holidays, I asked for a fountain pen, my very first fountain pen. It's a vacuum pen and I'll put a link to it. It's called Iris just because it's so beautiful and I can fill it with all kinds of different inks. If I get bored with one, I can clean it out and put a different ink in there, and I just don't get tired of that stuff. I love it and I don't care about having inky fingers, which I always do because I'm left-handed. But the name of the game is like appealing to your inner artist, appealing to the muse, and like what do they want, what do they like, and just give that to them. And it's not meant to be a groundbreaking exercise. It's a subtle exercise that accumulates over time.
Speaker 1:Morning pages have been how I have worked out some really difficult transitions in my life, and without the pages it would have taken me a lot longer to arrive at decisions that needed to be made, changes that needed to be made, because if I'm not paying attention to myself, I could ignore something uncomfortable for a really long time. But since I had this designated time every day in which I was decidedly not ignoring myself, those things came to the surface. Like well, gonna have to deal with this now, and I'm so glad that I did. But honestly, most of the time morning pages aren't groundbreaking, they aren't life-changing, they're subtle and often very boring, and I would not wish it upon anyone to read most of the absolute filth that has come out of my brain and onto the page during morning pages. It's just nothingness, but it helps you get that nothingness out so that you can find what's underneath it.
Speaker 1:One thing I do want to mention is that I think that most of us have really beautiful notebooks or journals that we've been given as gifts and they're like embossed leather maybe they have like a clasp on them or something and we put them on a bookshelf and we're like when I have something worth saying, I'll put it in this beautiful notebook. Don't save the good China, use the good China. If you are listening and you have one of those beautiful notebooks that you're like, once I have something worth saying, I'll actually crack this open. I don't want to defile this beautiful notebook with stupid thoughts. I want to challenge you to go to the bookshelf right now, get that beautiful notebook out and just start writing crap in it. No one is coming. No one is coming to check on you. No one is coming to to check on the value of the words that fill up this journal, because nobody cares. It's for you and you should use the good stuff.
Speaker 1:I am as guilty as anyone. I used to do this too, and now I vehemently do not do it. Any time I have a beautiful journal or a notebook, I go to that first, like this is mine. I'm going to fill it with my brain garbage and maybe get an idea or two out of it and maybe not. We'll see. So, for posterity's sake, if you're starting out, I want I'm just going to repeat a couple of things. If you end up writing lists, that's fine. If you end up writing your dreams, that's fine. If you end up writing this is boring and I hate it, that's fine. Anything you write is fine. You're not doing them wrong. You're not doing them wrong. It's impossible to do them wrong.
Speaker 1:And if you have questions about doing the pages and how you want to go about it, if I can be of service, just send me a note. I'm on Instagram Rachel Strickland Creative. I would love to hear from you. So now I want to switch over to those who maybe have been doing the pages for a while, especially because Erica said she wanted me to touch on what happens when they're boring, because sometimes it do be like that. I went through a long period of boring pages a few months ago I think it was three months and I barely got more than a paragraph each morning, and it's nothing to have a response about. Like, don't feel bad, you're fine. Do not feel bad, it doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Speaker 1:If you want to investigate it, you can start with questions like what about this experience is boring to me? I think that things feel boring to us when we feel like we can't get anything any more out of it than we've already gotten. But the idea that you can't get more out of yourself than you already have is an untruth in my opinion. I mean, it's not like you are boring, it's kind of impossible for you to be boring. But maybe you're just bored. And if you're bored, maybe it's time to revisit the question what is exciting to you? What is interesting to you, especially because it's so easy to get into like an auto response within our lives, in an autopilot. And if you're someone who's been used to investigating big questions about yourself and you know that you approach your life with curiosity and with courage, then you might think that it's impossible for you to silently somehow become bored and out of touch with what you really want to be doing and what's truly interesting to you. But it can still happen and let's look at this like a microcosm.
Speaker 1:I give a lot of movement exercises when I work with people in person and they're not exercise exercises, they're investigative exercises for creative excavation, and if I give someone an exercise, I give them 15 minutes to do it. And then after five they're sort of standing around and I'll ask them are you bored? And they say yeah, a little like dig deeper, there's more. You contain multitudes that this five minutes is not all that you can get out of yourself for this exercise. Try harder, go deeper, ask more questions, become curious. So I kind of think of it like that.
Speaker 1:And also there's ways that we can reignite our interest in doing journaling and artist pages in the first place. One is maybe do them at a different time of day. I've heard a lot of success that people have doing them the last thing Like. Even if they still do them in the morning. They really some people really like doing them as the last thing that they do in the day as well. It kind of helps get more of that brain garbage out so that they can sleep. And as I'm saying this, I'm like, why haven't I been doing that? Because my brain garbage is very heavy at the end of the day and then I have trouble sleeping. So thanks me, I'm gonna take my own advice now that I'm saying it out loud. So if you find yourself bored with morning pages, maybe change when it is that you're writing them. The time of day Also could change where you're doing them. Maybe the place that you have designated to do your pages in is beautiful and it means a lot to you, but maybe you just need a change of scenery in a different environment.
Speaker 1:Also, I think it could be fun, if you're feeling bored with your artist pages, that you start writing letters either to yourself at different points in your life, like letter to myself yesterday, letter to myself in 15 years, letter to myself at age 12, or and this one is really fun writing letters from things like body parts, like dear Rachel, these are your feet. We are writing to say thank you for no longer doing point work. This actually came up many years ago in San Francisco when myself and a couple friends decided to write ourselves letters from our vaginas and we learned a lot. We were like this is going to be such a cute and silly and stupid exercise. It's going to be fun. And then we wrote it and we were like damn, okay, all right, bitch got something to say, because where the mind falls short, the body has wisdom to tap into, and this that could be a way of tapping into it.
Speaker 1:Like what, what is boring? Like what, what's happening right now that we're feeling disenchanted with this practice, but as a kind of a closing caveat as we're nearing the end of our time today, the thing that I see that breaks my heart the most when an artist, particularly an artist that's been stuck for a while and is really trying to unstick themselves, so they start doing the morning pages but they can't get over the fact that it just feels like they're not doing them correctly or that they're doing them wrong, and then if they miss a day, they feel shame about that and I just want to burn it all in a fire, because there is nothing wrong with them, nothing wrong with them and there's nothing wrong with you, at least not that morning pages are going to be indicative of, because it is intended to be a practice of pleasure. It's intended to be intentional pleasure and a ritual that you enjoy with yourself at a certain time of day in a certain place, where it's just just get to be alone with your own thoughts, delicious, and if it's not delicious, that's actually really freaking interesting. Like let's investigate that, what sucks about this situation and also what would make it more enjoyable for you again or for the first time. And if you try a couple things and it's been months and you hate it. Don't do it, don't do the pages.
Speaker 1:Find some other creative practice, like go for a walk, or you know I hate meditating, I really do. I hate it. I know some people love it a lot and I think it's basically the same thing as morning pages. I just I really really hate sitting still. It makes me angry. All of these things could be worth investigating, but instead as a form of meditation, because it's not dissimilar.
Speaker 1:I use the pages, but in truth, any kind of practice or ritual that you can have with yourself that gives you a relationship with your own mind, outside of problem solving, all of these can be valuable. All of these can be good. You know, I've been doing these for so long and I've only missed a couple of times this year. Once because I was staying with some family and one of them, an elderly aunt, is in the advanced stages of dementia and I don't know if you've ever tried to journal with someone who is in that state of mind, but it's not useful. So that was one, and then another I think I had guessed over and usually if I miss them, I really miss them, like that was my time. I missed my time with me today. It's not a chore for me. It never really has felt like a chore, but on the odd occasion that like it just doesn't feel good that day, I write down, fuck this, and I close my notebook and then I get on with my life. That was the air kicking off.
Speaker 1:Sorry about the background changes in the audio wallpaper here, but as often as they are just mindless brain garbage, they have helped me realize that I needed to completely change the course of my life, change my career, stop taking a certain kind of contract, stop taking certain kinds of performances, stop teaching certain things that I wanted to teach other things and to put my energy other places. The morning pages have been there for me when I was naming my children and they've been there for me when I've lost them. And it's not that they were there for me. I was there for me because I had that time and if it wasn't in pages, I like to think that I would have a different kind of practice to to hold that time sacred for myself, like a walk or meditation. More power to you. An artist in one of my recent cycles named Scary. They did not enjoy writing morning pages, but they did enjoy doodling and doing morning doodles and drawings and they're really good at drawing Like. They sent me some of their little doodles and sketches because it's freaking awesome.
Speaker 1:And another student of mine doesn't like writing morning pages but she likes doing morning noodles on the hoop in her living room. So she'll just get up and do a little noodle nothing hard because she's just woken up. But that's her time with her and her brain. She just wants to be moving while doing it. So, obviously, unlimited options for how you choose to spend time with yourself and just to have a relationship with your own mind. But I hope that you can find a way to do this that feels pleasurable and that is not a chore, because it's not supposed to be unpleasant, it's supposed to be yummy.
Speaker 1:Looking at the time, I'm going to sign off while I'm still yummy, whatever that means, and say thank you so much for spending this time with me. Thank you, erica, for the question and for approaching me. If you have requests for future episodes, you can find me always on Patreon at Rachel Strickland Creative, or on Instagram at Rachel Strickland Creative and extra special. Thank you so much to my patrons for supporting this work and helping me put this out into the world. You are everything. Thank you so much. Don't go back to sleep.