Today marks 10 years of my daily practice of morning pages. If I have missed a day, I’m unaware of it. On days when the alarm clock broke, I did it later. On days when that became impossible I made it up the next day by doing double. Three pages or a half hour. Non-stop writing, non negotiable. It has become my little church, my tiny temple. More and more I’m a convert to the extraordinary power of small and constant acts.
I came across The Artist’s Way in the Brooklyn Library. I was dubious but it stayed in my bag for a week. I was seeing dead ends, half starts, bad jobs, and on one particularly devastating night on my Brooklyn rooftop I took inventory. Something needed to change. I went downstairs and read the first few chapters of the book, eyes rolling. ”Some of my students have done morning pages for a decade...” yeah right. But I set out a new journal and decided to try it first thing the next morning anyway. I had nothing to lose.
My heroes never needed a self help book on creativity. What failing did I possess that I needed one? These made up the laments of my first entry. I opened the journal the next day and did it again. I played along with the ruse, doing the book’s exercises, the check ins. “Get ready for radical shifts...” it warned. More eye rolling.
Within two weeks I was let go from my dead end golden handcuff job. I’d take side jobs landscaping rooftop gardens in Manhattan instead. I met a therapist on the upper west side I still see to this day. I pulled a lousy one-act out of the trash and would spend the next six months reworking it until it found a theatre, which today is my artistic home. By the autumn I’d left New York and was enrolled in a graduate school that would change my life.
I've come to these pages under-slept, hung over, sick, I wrote when the wind was fucking with the paper, on international flights where the hour of “morning” was unclear, in a tent deep in the Sierras, I wrote riding shotgun. They taught me to find rest while making something. .
Here is approximately 3 million words (Ten large novels). 1800 hours. 55 pounds of paper, filled front and back.
But this is not writing. No. It’s the patter of track shoes at dawn. These are the folds in a bullpen catcher’s mitt. Here is the slide of petty detritus from which the occasional song arises. Here is where the apology, the business plan, and Act Two come to work themselves out. Here is the celluloid on the editing floor. The sawdust and scrap below the table. Here is indulgence in judgements and crank, bad moods, complaints, and my worst, so I can get onto my best. I often wrote while my coffee cooled, always to my left.
Julia Cameron taught me to rest at the page. Along the way I learned what a great poet once said of making— to trust that there is still time. And if there isn't time, that's okay too.
