Morning Pages: How To Begin

Morning Pages, an idea introduced to me by Buster Benson's 750words.com, are my daily writing habit. Maybe they might become yours.

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First, decide to write. Today. Not tomorrow. Now gather your materials.

You need three blank pages. I prefer loose pages to a notebook for reasons I'll make clear later. You need a pen, not a pencil. Pen does other things for you. Again, I'll explain all that later, but for now, get your pen, get your pages. (And if you absolutely must use a pencil, go ahead.) Put yourself in a place of solitude for an hour, maybe more. I write in my basement nook of an office. If you must have coffee or tea, prepare it. Put on music if you like.

I found my method, tools, and space over time, but started with pen, paper, a table and a chair. I began first thing in the morning and didn't move on until I had finished three pages. I concentrated only on filling those pages.

What you write almost doesn't matter. Just write three pages with the words only you can create. (While infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters will eventually write Hamlet, we're short a few monkeys and so have to do the writing ourselves.)

Begin with whatever thought crosses your mind. "I'm tired" or "It's 5:03 in the morning" or "In the dream..." and go from there. Don't plan topics in advance at first. Don't do assignments. Write for yourself. Do not show your pages to anyone.

Sit or stand at your desk. Write today's date and a page number on each of the three blank pages. Begin on the first line of page one and keep going. Don't erase. Don't make it pretty. Don't worry. Just write until the last line of page three. You don't have to get to the end of the last line, but you have to reach that last line with at least one word. When you do, you're done for the morning.

This is how it begins.

Tomorrow, you'll do it all again.

Morning Pages: This Again?

This is part of a series of posts in which I talk about Morning Pages. I've been thinking about putting together a talk or maybe even a book and am going to test-drive these here for the next couple days.

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"I've written this all before." That's the thought I had writing my Morning Pages today. If someone was bored enough, they could go back through the thousands of my Morning Pages and find multiple occasions of what I wrote this morning. My immediate reaction is that this is bad and embarrassing. Repetition can’t be good. What will people think?

Then I remember: no one will ever know. Well, except you reading this, but that’s okay.

Morning Pages have an audience of only one. I don’t have to worry about being redundant (or sloppy, or foolish, or even stupid) because they are just for me. Having that thought, “I’ve written this before,” is a good reminder that I may want to be thinking about something else or stretch the thought to something larger, but it’s not an indication that I need to hang my head or panic.

Repeating myself is one of the best ways I learn. I make things real to myself by repeating the words in my mind and on the page. That repetition accustoms me to the idea such that then bringing it out into the world is made easy. Repeating myself reduces my fear and anxiety.

There are many regular themes in my Morning Pages. These are ideas to which I return often because they still interest me and I know that I have not learned all I can about them. I go back, sift through my thinking again, and more often than not find some nugget worth saving. More than likely I’ll return to the topic again and again. It’s also likely that I’ll worry that I’m just rehashing old ideas.

It’s okay. They’re not for publication.

That said, this whole thing started midway down page two of my April 26, 2019 Morning Pages. I began writing then with the intent to create something. That intention and the idea were enough to start me moving toward this. Still, I knew that whatever I wrote in that last page and a half of Morning Pages would never see the light of anyone else’s day. That gave me the permission and understanding to be able to write one of Anne Lamott’s shitty first drafts.

Morning Pages aren’t usually even first drafts. They are thinking — writing by hand on paper with a pen might be the most elevated thinking possible. Morning Pages are the physical manifestation of thought. Thinking within the confines of your head, your ideas are wholly your own until you transform them and give them voice. My Morning Pages remain my own, but this transformed thought is ready to go out into the world.

I’m still thinking about how I was repeating myself this morning as I wrote and this comes to me as explanation: Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself. I am large, I contain redundancies. And besides, no one is going to see them so I might as well repeat myself and learn something.

Exclamation!

Benjamin Dreyer writes in The Washington Post that it's time to toss out the exclamation point. I know what he means!

I just sent an email to a friend about his recent visit to my house and found myself stuck with too many exclamation points. Every period felt like dropping my voice at the end of the sentence, suggesting that the visit hadn't really been great, that I wasn't really excited, that really, I could have done without him stopping by.

This is what happens when we abuse the language and punctuation!

Another friend, as a kid, used to read the comic strip Gil Thorp, almost every panel of which contained an exclamation point or two. He used to read it aloud as it was punctuated so that Gil was Trying Out For The Sport Team! or Going To Ask Her To Go Steady! He shouted each line with a forced smile. Sometimes we would talk like Gil Thorp: Let's Have Steak-Ums For Lunch! or I Have To Take A Dump!

My students tell me that the exclamation point is unavoidable in texts. Without them the reader thinks that the writer doesn't care. It's like that episode of Seinfeld when Elaine's boyfriend doesn't add an exclamation point after the announcement of a baby. That was the end of that relationship. My students feel the same way!

An exclamation point on my old typewriter requires typing a period, backspacing, and typing an apostrophe. There's no exclamation point key (it would be above the 1 which is made by typing a lowercase L instead) so it's a pain to type exclamation points. Typewriter manufacturers knew enough about good writing (and were stingy enough about adding keys) that they influenced writers to stick with the period.

Elmore Leonard's fifth rule of writing is "Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose." As soon as you learn to write as well as Elmore Leonard, feel free to flout his rules.

Dreyer in The Post says that exclamation points are "just so tempting when you feel the need to turn up the volume on a workaday thought" but that the usage of them has "mushroomed till they've become the standing ovation of punctuation: an obligatory, performative demonstration of enthusiasm meant to reassure" readers that everything is Great! The Best Ever! But, "If everything's exciting, ultimately nothing is."

I tell college students that they are allowed one exclamation point per paper. I've thought about confining them to one per semester, but that seems unnecessarily draconian. I mean really! Dreyer has suggested "that writers confine themselves, over the course of a full-length book, to, at most, a dozen exclamation points." A writer replied, "Over the course of an entire career, you mean."

I'm unlikely to meet that goal, but, as Gil Thorp might say, it's worth a try!

A Visit & Morning Pages

My friend is here. I picked him up at the airport yesterday. We stayed up last night talking until almost two which made getting up at six a challenge but well worth it to spend time with a friend I haven't seen in a year and a half. The lack of sleep is nothing. I want to soak up every moment.

Last night, just the two of us in the living room, he said, "I love your house. It's so cozy." He's not the first to say so and each time I take it two ways. One, we make a comfortable home. Two, it's a simple kind of place. I don't mean that we have a shabby house, but no one will mistake it for fancy. It has no pretensions and feels simply like home. That's how it felt to my friend and how it feels to me.

Some of this is the effect of the furniture and decorations, but it's more that my daughters chose to sit out in the living room with their mother and me and my old college roommate. They talked and listened, joked and told stories. The comfort of this home comes from the four of us and it's palpable. Even after my wife and the girls had gone up to bed, there was the feeling of comfort and ease that comes only with a long-term friendship and a place in which two old friends can sink back into things as though no time at all has passed. No wonder we stayed up almost to two.

Four hours of sleep and off my schedule I got up, emptied the dishwasher, got laundry out of the dryer for my older daughter to have the right clothes for school, opened the blinds, turned off the furnace, and sat down to write three Morning Pages. There's a comfort there as well, though I wanted to go back to sleep or make a cup of coffee. The comfort is in doing what I do, what I have done. I sat down, uncapped the pen, and figured myself out with blue ink over three pages. I think about the blog post for the day, an idea I mapped out a couple days ago, and a note I want to write to a friend.

Less than half a page in, I'm in the groove. I have momentum and energy like rolling downhill into the sunrise.

The writing sets the table for the meal of my morning, afternoon, and evening. It creates a mood, a way of being. The results of this aren't anything I can measure or set down in exact figures try as I might. It is instead a feeling, one about which I'm as sure as of anything. The pages open me for the day, put me in a space and mode. From there the day flows.

There are things about Morning Pages which go beyond the boundaries of the written word, the ineffable effects that, like friendship, comfort, warmth, and love, must be felt perhaps without any logical understanding. Why do I do Morning Pages? Why should you? I can only begin to tell you. The rest you need to feel.

My friend said, "we have to find ways to see each other more than once a year." Why do we need to see each other? Who bother when we live so far apart? To push this defies logic. Of course it does. There is no logic in friendship, in love, in the simple need to fill three pages by hand this morning after staying up until two with my friend and then waking at six with the family. It all defies logic and works at some other level.

I'm willing to call that level what it is: magic.