EXERCISE: A Phrase Without A Home

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 02:55:59 -0400

I've been toying with it, but go ahead and feel free to wrap it up, slice and dice, and make something of it...

I swear I only blinked the other day, and summer fled upon its way

write!

EXERCISE: Your Morning Pages?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 22:26:27 -0400

Did you do your morning pages today?

For some of you, this may be a familiar phrase.  For others, I'll provide an explanation.

I'm going to start a series of exercises based on The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.  This was a popular book... copyright is 1992.  I'd had it on my list of "I ought to look at this" for a while, and recently stumbled over a stack in a local "super bargain" store, so I bought one.

Right off the bat, Julia proposes a daily discipline: the morning pages. The idea is to start your day by writing three pages.  Not for readers, not necessarily good writing, just let your fingers (pen, brush, keyboard, etc.) go.  Fill the pages and turn them over.  Put them away, these are not for the editor (she recommends NOT looking at what you've written for eight weeks!).  This is time for your id to dance on the pages, for the inner child to peek out from under the edge of the cardboard box, for all those urges to creativity that your inner censor considers incense to catch fire (what the heck was that?  oh, keep going!).

From the book:

"What are morning pages?  Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness."

"There is no wrong way to do morning pages.  These daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art.  Or even writing.  ... pages are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind.  Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included."

"The morning pages are the primary tool of creative recovery.  As blocked artists, we tend to criticize ourselves mercilessly.  Even if we look like functioning artists to the world, we feel we never doing enough and what we do isn't right.  We are victims of our own internalized perfectionist, a nasty internal and eternal critic, the Censor, who resides in our (left) brain and keeps up a constant stream of subversive remarks that are often disguised as the truth.  The Censor says wonderful things like: 'You call that writing?  What a joke.  You can't even punctuate.  If you haven't done it by now you never will.  You can't even spell.  What makes you think you can be creative?'  And on and on."

Meditation, unbinding the wizard within, trash, a way to deal with fears and despair and boredom, whatever you want to call them, the morning pages are a discipline for creativity.

So what are you waiting for?  Decide now that tomorrow morning, first thing, you'll write three pages.  Not writer's writing, just letting brain race, letting the monkey sniff and scratch, letting the world settle into being so that you can breathe.

And so that when you can say to yourself, "Yes, I did my morning pages today."

Write.

(next time -- dating your artist?  or how I learned to spend quality time with myself...)