Morning Pages

Cricket McRae

It’s still dark outside, and the morning star – which is really the planet Venus – precedes the sunrise. It’s very close to earth right now, a bright, shiny beacon hanging at the end of night. I stepped outside to take a look while the kettle heated on the stove, breathing in the crisp air and listening to the deer – or perhaps raccoons – rustle through the dry grass on the other side of the fence.

Back inside, I brewed a pot of Earl Grey. I am the only one awake in the house, save for a purring orange cat. We’re both curled up in a blanket on the sofa while flames dance in the fireplace, and the scent of honey rises from my cup of tea. The computer screen is the brightest thing in the room.

Soon I will put aside the computer and write in my morning page notebook. Remember morning pages? Julia Cameron introduced them in The Artist’s Way, but Dorothea Brande suggested the same thing in Becoming a Writer back in 1934 (still one of the best books out there for beginning writers or anyone who is having trouble sustaining a writing project). The idea is to get up in the morning – every morning – and write without stopping until you hit three pages. The devilish editor on your shoulder doesn’t have time to engage, you develop a habit of writing every single day, and I, at least, find the process ferrets out a surprising number of truths.

Morning pages can be a kind of self-therapy. At the same time, they can lull you into thinking you’ve written for the day. It’s also possible they could sap some of your writing energy, much as I’ve heard some people say blogging siphons off a portion of their creative mojo. How it affects you really depends on how you view the process.

For a year or more in the mid-nineties I faithfully wrote my morning pages as Cameron describes. But over time, I’ve tweaked them to suit my own needs. Doing them first thing in the morning still works very well, but I don’t do them every day. Or even every week. And though on occasion I just want to brain dump or need to work out a problem that requires what I refer to as “thinking on paper,” more often I try to focus morning pages on something in particular. As a result, they’ve turned into a stepping stone that then propels me into my other writing.

Today I plan to write a scene in which a woman encounters a girl she thought she knew in a place she’d never expect to find her. I need to know how that feels – for both of them. I want to think about how this meeting sets the tone for their relationship throughout the rest of the story. It would be a good idea to play with how a recurring theme in the story can flicker through this scene. And finally, I simply don’t know enough about the girl and her background. Focused free writing will help me find these things out.

Sometimes it's a better thing to simply sit down and write. To allow that magical thing to come out of nowhere and flavor or twist what you’ve planned to put on the page. Or even not to plan at all. But this is a brand new character for me, and an important one. In this story, I’m working in a different fictional world than the one I’m used to.

Being able to write about the upcoming scene will afford back story that right this moment I’m unaware of. It’s the same kind of magic, finding the answers to questions and, more than likely, finding more questions to ask. It’s an aspect of getting to know the story that’s invisible to the reader – not simply research, plotting, or character development, but all those and more.

Do you use free writing as a tool either in your writing or in your life? Do you find journaling useful?