three pages of garbage, let's try it
three pages of garbage, let's try it
Morning Pages-November, inspired by Jaime Green and Julia Cameron, now with dog photos
Welcome to Write More! This is the your mid-month pop-in, which comes with ideas and encouragement to keep you going. I also send out a monthly intentions email on the last Sunday before a new month starts that aims to help you think through your goals and intentions for your writing practice in the coming month and to reflect on your progress in the previous month. (The November intentions email just went out this past Sunday, if you want to check it out.)
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Why hello there. Here we are on this first day of November. Inspired by writer Jaime Green, I’m going to try a little thing this month, and I wanted to invite you all to join me: writing three pages, longhand, each morning. Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, calls it “Morning Pages,” but Green refers to it as “Three Pages of Garbage,” which I like for how delightfully low stakes it is. We might not have time to write anything good, but surely we can find the time for three fast, terrible pages?
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I’ve always been resistant to Morning Pages or journaling, and I think that’s just the rebellious teenager in me, once again huffily explaining that I’m not writing in a diary, I’m writing a poem, mom. [Insert infuriating teenager eyeroll here. Sorry, mom!]
But what’s wrong with journaling? In her Lifehacker piece about Morning Pages, Green gives two reasons why the practice is helpful:
You get to see what’s going on in your brain.
You practice putting words down without stopping to evaluate them.
As Green explains,
Each of those benefits is huge by itself, but together they add up to something more, a loosening of the idea-spouting machinery in your mind. When you’re used to just letting your ideas flow… they flow more, even when you’re not freewriting. And when you’re used to not interrupting your idea-flow with concerns about your ideas’ quality, you give more of your ideas a chance. You’ll have more ideas.
Yesterday on Twitter, Green suggested three pages each weekday (except Thanksgiving) as an alternative to NaNoWriMo, and that feels like an ambitious but attainable practice for the month.
I got started this morning, with an assist from the newest member of my household, who woke up at 5am, barking because I think he just wanted to hang out. Thanks, buddy! While my three pages were indeed not great, I do think it helped me to shake some things loose in my brain first thing.
I’ll be sharing snippets (and more dog pictures!) over on instagram this month, if you want to join in over there.
Have you done Morning Pages? Does journaling work for you? Are you trying NaNoWriMo?
Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. Have a tip or writing practice you’d like to share? A challenge you’d like help with? Reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).
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I have been writing Morning Pages, somewhat consistently (I usually miss the days on the weekends), for about 2 years. I find it helpful in planning out my day and prioritizing my "to do" list. I also sometimes come up with some real nuggets during my free form writing that I use to create something else (a poem or a short story).
I've been writing Morning Pages, more-or-less faithfully, for about three months. I've found that it is a wonderful tool to get into the habit of daily writing, with a couple of caveats. (1) It's a bit too easy for me to see it as all the writing I could possibly find time to do on a given day, so I have to make sure that I schedule other writing time and (2) as a bit of a perfectionist, I thought I should get the big old college-ruled notebook, so I'd write and write - and write some more - but I've just recently switched to something smaller and for me, more user friendly. It's the habit, not the quantity, and I guess if you're on a roll, you could write more than three pages once in a while. I do find it helpful and will stick with it for November, and beyond.