Morning Pages

Morning Pages is a simple writing practice developed by the writer Julia Cameron and introduced in her book The Artist’s Way ↗.

The instruction is simple: every morning, as close to waking as possible, you write three full pages by hand, in longhand.

Not an essay. Not a journal that has to be interesting. Not an attempt to reach some insight. You simply write everything passing through your head.

Cameron describes Morning Pages as three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing. In her view there’s no “correct” way to write them: you can write thoughts, worries, complaints, plans, nonsense, things that repeat themselves, or anything else that shows up. The pages are private, not meant for any other reader.

I like to think of this act in slightly less elegant words: draining the mind.

Draining the mind

When I wake up in the morning, my head is already full.

Something bothering me from yesterday. Something I need to do today. A conversation I keep replaying in my head. An idea. A fear. A plan. A judgment. The same sentence I’ve already thought twenty times.

Instead of trying to sort all of it out, Morning Pages let you simply get it out onto the paper.

You don’t need to decide what matters and what doesn’t. You write.

After a few lines something else shows up. You write that too. And then something else.

The three pages create enough space to get past the first, obvious things circling in your head. Sometimes underneath them something shows up that I didn’t even know I was thinking about.

And sometimes not. That’s fine too.

The goal isn’t to produce an insight every morning. The goal is to write.

But I have nothing to write

For me too, the thought of writing was really challenging at first.

Three pages every morning sounded like a lot. And mostly the question that came up was: what could I possibly have to write three pages about?

What helped me was dropping entirely the expectation that the content should mean something.

If I have nothing to write, I can simply write: I have nothing to write.

And if there’s still nothing: I have nothing to write. I have nothing to write. I have nothing to write. As many times as needed.

At some point another thought usually shows up: I’m tired. Why am I even doing this? I need to remember to call someone today. What happened yesterday is still bothering me.

And from there you keep going.

There doesn’t need to be a connection from one sentence to the next. There’s no need for a plot, a conclusion, or logical order. You can start on one subject, move to another, circle back, and then write something with no connection at all to anything before it.

The main thing is to keep writing.

It’s precisely when you drop the demand that the writing be good, interesting, or meaningful that the stream of consciousness sometimes starts appearing on the page almost by itself.

Why exactly three pages?

It’s very easy to turn Morning Pages into “five minutes of writing.”

I prefer to stick with Cameron’s original instruction: three pages. Handwritten. Letter-sized (or A4).

Cameron herself recommends A4 or its American equivalent, 8.5×11 inches, and argues that smaller pages also shrink the space available for thought.

But for me, the three pages serve another purpose too.

On the first page it’s still relatively easy to stay with what I already know. On the second page, what I’d planned to say sometimes starts running out. And on the third page I already have to keep writing even when I have no idea what the next sentence is.

It’s precisely there that something surprising sometimes shows up.

Not every day. And there’s no need to look for it.

Why in the morning?

Cameron recommends doing the practice first thing in the morning, as close to waking as possible.

I like this because it lets me meet what’s already in my mind before the day starts adding more and more to it.

Before the messages. Before the news. Before work. Before I’m already deep inside the day’s tasks.

There’s something interesting about seeing what’s there when almost nothing has happened yet.

Consistency is part of the practice

In my view, like with many other practices, the value of Morning Pages lies less in any particular day and more in returning to them again and again.

One day the writing can feel meaningful. The next day it can be three pages of complaints, lists, and unimportant things.

If I judge the practice by what comes out of it on a given morning, it’s very easy to stop.

But Morning Pages aren’t a creativity test. The practice is also just the act of sitting in front of the page and writing, day after day.

Three pages today. And three more tomorrow.

Slowly you start recognizing things that repeat. Thoughts I tell myself over and over. Things I keep putting off. Wishes I barely give any room to. Sometimes something that looked enormous in my head takes on a different proportion once it’s on paper.

Not because I solved it. Simply because I finally saw it.

Is this a Buddhist practice?

No.

Morning Pages isn’t a Buddhist practice, and Julia Cameron never presented it as one.

But for me it became a tool that supports my practice.

In meditation I learn to notice a thought without having to follow it. In Morning Pages I do something almost the opposite: I let a thought go wherever it wants, and follow it with the pen.

And interestingly, both paths let me see a little more clearly what’s happening in the mind.

One in silence. The other in three pages of noise.

The Artist’s Way

Morning Pages are only one of the tools in Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way.

The book is structured as a twelve-week process meant to help identify and release blocks to creativity. Alongside Morning Pages it includes another central tool called the “Artist Date” — a weekly block of time we devote, alone, to something that sparks curiosity, play, and inspiration.

Despite the title, the book isn’t only for professional artists. It deals with our relationship to creativity, self-criticism, fear, and our capacity to make room for the things we want to create.

This is a very warm recommendation from me.

Even if you don’t do the whole process in the book, Morning Pages alone are a tool I think is worth getting to know.

And if you decide to try them, I’d suggest not asking after three days whether they’re “working.”

Get a large notebook.

Get up in the morning.

Write three pages.

And the next day — do it again.