I’ve not done a blog post for a while, I haven’t felt in the creative groove. The thing is, you can’t wait for the muse to come to you, as many writers and artists know and have attested to, you have to go to the muse, which really means you have to sit down, apply yourself. You have to do the work.

In her popular book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron advocates the task every day of writing “morning pages”. It goes like this. Ideally, before you start your working day, before you do anything else, you sit and write three pages. Three pages of absolutely anything that comes to mind. And if nothing comes to mind, you just have to write “I don’t have anything to write” over and over again, until you’ve done your three pages. You have to do this every day, whether you feel like it or not. The theory behind this is that by outpouring your thoughts onto the page, and as you keep going and keep digging deeper, you will get to the good stuff. By doing this outpouring, Julia Cameron says you are going beyond the conscious, beyond what you know on a superficial level, and you start to plunge into your unconscious, where all your ideas and feelings and desires are stored.

You are able to connect, through writing, to the very heart of you.

I have read about examples of people who have done morning pages and have changed their lives by doing so. Through writing, these people have worked out what was not fulfilling in their lives and then were able to change it.

In addition to tapping into the unconscious, by writing in quantity you will eventually produce something of quality. Out of the “rubbish” from time to time will come the nuggets of wisdom, will come the diamonds. Gems of fiction or stylistic gold.

And by doing a little and regularly, you’ll eventually get more done than in one burst of effort once in your life. Someone famous said that, and now I forget who. This sentiment is replicated in another lovely little book, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. The advice of this book is to just take everything a step at a time. Don’t overwhelm yourself with a massive task of writing a novel or painting a masterpiece. Do a little at a time, write a few words a day, do a doodle here and there.

And I’ll add into the mix: share it. By sharing some of our work we put ourselves out there. But by sharing it we are not saying we are the best at writing or designing, neither are we saying “look at me, aren’t I great”. We share it because we want to connect with the wider world. And in part it is saying “I might actually not think I’m the best but I am as worthy as anyone else. I am a little scared of what other people might think of me, people might not like what I say or feel, or think my drawing is rubbish. But I am not going to worry about what other people think. I’m just going to get on with my work and not care if other people rate me or like me.”

And that facing down the fear is often a very difficult thing to do, because most of us have been raised to worry what other people think. We are conditioned to tow the line and please others. We learn very early on in our lives that to please, to make our carers like and love us, means our safety. It is a total survival instinct, to foster that sense of love and respect.

So now as adults we do find it very hard to put ourselves out there, to offer ourselves up to failure and to not care what others think. And one of the greatest inhibitions to creativity is fear of failure. This fear of failure and how it stops us exploring our creativity and expressing ourselves is something I gave a talk on recently.

And that is the beauty of the morning pages. While you are working out what to write, and what are the gems, and what can get cut, you don’t share it with anyone. Morning pages mean you don’t have to tell anyone: this undertaking can give you the complete freedom to absolutely brain dump the most ridiculous, idiotic nonsense and be safe in the knowledge that you are doing it for no other reason than in and of itself. You are doing it for you, to connect with the deepest parts of you, to find out what makes you tick, what you want to say, even what you want in life. You can keep it to yourself if you want to but imagine, imagine writing 750 or 1,000 words every day, what an amazing body of work you will soon have. And by panning through the dirt, the gems and gold may just sparkle through, and maybe you’ll have enough material for that novel you have often dreamed about writing.

I wrote the draft of this post via my own version of morning pages. I managed to knock the whole thing out pretty quick once I’d got going (having started with only one or two lines in mind,). So it holds true: show up, sit down and start writing!