Morning pages, originally uploaded by bobsee.
What makes a space a creative space? Every Saturday in the Guardian there is a photo of a writer’s room. It got me thinking about the spaces which somehow make creativity flow.
A number of years ago I read The Artist’s Way and I two lessons really stuck with me (but for some reason I never got round to carrying them out until recently).
The first lesson was what Julia Cameron calls “morning pages”. Her idea is that you should write, pretty much stream of conscious writing, every morning until you’ve filled three pages of a notebook. Well, I never did it, until 27th December last year. Since then I haven’t missed a single day and it’s almost a kind of addiction now. If I don’t actually do it first thing there’s a kind of irritation in me, a discomfort, until I sit myself down and write the three pages.
I haven’t stuck to writing first thing but most mornings I do get up at 6am, shave, shower, dress, then sit myself down and write the three pages. If I’ve got time left, I have breakfast! I find it takes anything from 15 minutes to just over half an hour to write the three pages. I’m not precious about the stream of consciousness thing but I do try not to stop once I’ve started (I don’t pause for thought, worry about grammar or punctuation).
Sometimes I have written on the train, on a plane, in a cafe or in an airport. The variety gives me a bit of a kick. I let myself just ENJOY it and don’t give myself a hard time for not having written within an hour of getting out of bed. With this leeway, I’ve written 3 pages EVERY single day since December 27th and I really don’t see me stopping now.
I didn’t read what I’d written at all for the first six weeks and I haven’t kept up a time for writing what I’ve written (in fact, most of what I’ve written I haven’t read!). However, my creativity has been unleashed! I can’t tell you just how much but I take more photos than ever before, post up to Flickr for the first time ever, started this bog, wrote a few pages for a website……I could go on. I just feel that ideas don’t rattle around my head like hard peas in a tin any more, rather they come together, they develop and, more than anything, they turn into real world phenomena – words and images mainly.
I cannot recommend this habit highly enough. It is transformative.
Heroes Not Zombies 
thanks for writing your thoughts about this. I have also written morning pages for awhile, and haven’t carved out the time recently, but I think I’ll dive back into it. I’m hoping that it can be a starting point for creative flow, getting past the hardest part of simply starting, so that the good stuff can follow the flow. Your post stirred a remembered feeling about all this – thanks!
thankyou Ester, glad to inspire you! Have you ever come across Steve Pavlina’s 30 day habit idea? You’ll find the original post here – http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success/
His idea is that if you want to change something commit to it for 30 days as a kind of trial. If its a habit you want to keep you’ll find it pretty easy after the first 30 days to keep going, and if it’s not, you can just drop it then. Like you I agree the hardest part is starting, but seriously, its like a drug now. I CANNOT let a day go by without doing the three pages.
yeah, I have actually seen Pavlina’s blog before, and skimmed only his intro page. I’ll definitely take another look there. Thanks for the link, and thoughts. I’m really liking your blog. Your view on medicine, and treating the patient, rather than just the disease is something that I strongly agree with, and sadly, have yet to find any doctors near me with the same ideas. I think if I ever get sick, I’ll just have to fly over to Scotland for a visit 😉
[…] know that since I started doing the morning pages about a year ago my own creativity and productivity has gone through the roof. This blog here is a […]
What do you write about? everything that comes to your mind?
sugarmouse, Julia Cameron’s idea (in The Artist’s Way), is to write fast, not to think it through, but to just keep writing without pausing at all until the three pages are filled. I found it quite a strange thing to do at first, but once you get into it, it flows. So sometimes I’m writing about what’s happened the day before, sometimes I’m writing about what I’m going to do today, sometimes I’m writing about the noise of the rain on the roof, really, it’s different all the time. Well, actually sometimes I find I’m writing about the same thing several days in a row and that alerts me to the fact I’m stuck on something and need to change to progress it.
[…] explain why in a future post!), experimenting with recipes from my favourite Skye Gyngell book, writing morning pages, meditating while knitting, pretending to be a tourist, catching matinees at arthouse cinemas, […]