For a decade I have started most days by filling three pages of a cheap notebook before I speak to anyone. The practice is not original; I took it from a book I read in my twenties. What I did not expect was how little it would resemble writing.
Morning pages are not for readers, and not even for rereading. They are a drain. Whatever is circling at the back of the mind at six a.m. (the unsent reply, the worry about money, the half-remembered dream) goes onto the page and leaves the head. By the time I sit down to real work, the room is quieter.
What ten years taught me
- The pages do not need to be good. They work best when they are slightly embarrassing.
- Missing a day is not failure. The practice survives the gap if you resume without comment.
- The same worries repeat for months, then vanish. Seeing that is its own consolation.
I have never once reread them. A box of notebooks sits on the top shelf of the study, a kind of ballast. I like knowing it is there, and I like even more that I have no wish to open it.
