Writing Daily Pages . . . Sort of

It’s late afternoon now, but I just finished my “morning pages” an hour ago. While I try writing daily pages, I find they are not usually “morning” pages or even “daily.” That effort has helped me recover my voice and write my way through a bout of depression. I’m a believer . . .

Usually.

Julia Cameron, famous for The Artist’s Way, has built a self-help empire for the “artist in recovery.” Even her most recent work, The Listening Path, emphasizes her three basic steps. Write three “morning pages” every day, take yourself on an “artist’s date” once a week, and get out and walk as often as you can.

Morning pages are meant to be stream-of-consciousness pages written by hand on first awakening. If you’re familiar with the exercise of “Freewriting,” this is basically your plan here: write for yourself alone, uninterrupted and unedited.

Along the way, you should discover new things about yourself. You’ll wipe away the junk that clouds your perception. (I’m reminded of Bill Hicks, who joked about getting his “third eye squeegeed quite cleanly”–with daily writing, however, no hallucinogens need to be involved.)

During my first reading of The Artist’s Way, I did the three pages religiously. But I didn’t always do them first thing in the morning. I needed food, needed coffee, needed to take care of the dogs . . . While Cameron is very firm about the early-morning part, I met one writer who always does her pages at night. Instead of preparing for the day ahead, she used her pages to put the day to bed. For this writer, her adapted system works.

So sometimes I’m writing daily pages in the morning, afternoon, night . . . Whenever I need to break out that squeegee. Interestingly, I realized I didn’t write them when I was actively working on another creative project. When I had momentum on a big project, when my “spoons” were dedicated for something else, that was when I skipped the pages. When the momentum ebbed, when my last “spoon” was a plastic spork, that was a great time for pages.

In Finding Water, Cameron writes, “I am a writer and writers write. Every day that I write, I am keeping my side of the bargain.” Writing pages helps me fulfill that bargain. It doesn’t matter if they sit unread. I kept my promise, and I wrote something.

If I did that, even on days I felt like crap . . . What else can I do?