The Artist’s Way Week 1: At Last, The Morning Pages

Procrastination is central to my creative endeavours. I incline towards hesitation and I waver at the point of departure. I’m a dawdler. What was once frowned upon is now an old friend I cannot shake; I’ve become accustomed to their company and life seems all the better for it. I take long walks and runs, I pootle about the house and garden and all this can be justified as part of the process for the (emerging) writer. It’s an investment in the end product. As is often the case, this runs through my mind on my meandering route to the desk on the morning – it’s mid-morning by now – set aside for learning The Basic Tools. To quiet the doubter-within, I remind myself that Julia Cameron has creativity licked: she has at least one book published by a proper publisher, one of those international media groups whose reach spans the globe. And I’m not alone, even though I elected to be so, because tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of artists have turned to this book in a moment of crisis.

Good news: there are only two ‘pivotal tools’. Bad news: if I’m going to achieve ‘a lasting creative awakening’ I’m going to be in it for the long term. Why do people delight in telling you there are no quick fixes? It’s as though I’ve done something wrong and now I have to pay penance on some kind of loop. My daily mortification? The morning pages, which I will be completing every day for the next twelve weeks. At the time of writing, the author had been doing her morning pages for a decade, and I infer that I should plan to do the same: ‘three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness’. I pull my chair closer to the desk. I haven’t written longhand for decades, with the exception of a poetry module during which the tutor insisted that we use pen or pencil. A happy memory floats into view: I’m leaning towards the table in junior school during handwriting lessons; my writing is praised and I’m one of the first in our class to move from pencil to ballpoint pen. I get a Papermate for Christmas, which I love, but what I really want is a Parker like Dad uses. Now I have a chance to recover if not the artist within, then at least my once-admired Nelson. And some of my stories materialise through stream-of-consciousness; it’s a technique I’m not afraid to use. Something good could come of this.

I take a breath. In all of my projects there comes a point when I get carried away. Thankfully, Julia is ahead of me. ‘There is no wrong way to do the morning pages. These daily meanderings are not meant to be art. Or even writing.’ What a shame. I thought we were on to something. But this isn’t where the good stuff arrives. This is the simple act of writing across three pages of paper; getting something down; unloading; a kind of emetic. As I understand it, this is flushing out the crap that has been washing around the brain overnight and is the cause of the blockage. The following morning I rise, as instructed, half an hour early and after making a cup of coffee (is that allowed?) I sit down and open an old notebook of which two thirds of the pages are blank. This is my first mistake and time will tell, but I think it’s a big one I have chosen A4 when size is not stipulated. A5 would have been easier, but there is nothing else to hand and it’s now or never. I pick up the Parker I have been waiting to use since Christmas 2018 and begin to write.

I am not allowed to revisit the morning pages, so I am unable to review what I have written. I read somewhere that I will be able to take a look when the twelve weeks is over, but not before. This is both a disappointment and a relief: firstly, I’m an obsessive self-editor; and secondly, the start of this process coincides with the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown. On the first morning my anxiety levels are alarmingly high and two-thirds of the way through page number 1 I develop chest and arm pains. I stop several times for deep breathing exercises and wonder whether or not to consult my wife, but I get to the end and go out for my permitted walk. The pains subside. I eat breakfast and turn to the news.

Read the next instalment here.