Morning Pages: Re-establishing the Habit
I had stopped when I started writing on Medium
I miss my Morning Pages.
I learned about the morning pages from Julia Cameron, of course. She is the one who coined the term that is so popular among the writers.
When I took a class on Creative Writing in 1990 (OMG, that was three decades ago), I learned about free-form writing. It came from reading I can do anything I want if I knew what it was, by Barbara Sher, as a part of the required reading.
She mentioned writing uninterrupted for a specific amount of time. If you can’t think of anything, write I can’t think of anything, she suggested. It was fun. But when I left the writers guild we started after the class was over, I stopped writing.
Writing is like a drug. Once you’ve tried it, there is no going back. I kept coming back to it again and again. Every time, I used the Barbara Sher method of free-form writing to get me going.
Then I read The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life by Julia Cameron. She called it the Morning Pages and recommended that you do it first thing in the morning while your mind is fresh and uncluttered.
I am a morning person. I loved the idea and started doing it. That’s how I, more or less, wrote my first book, Life: It’s a Trip. It’s a collection of stories from my life. I was doing it regularly when I started writing on Medium.
After a while, I stopped the Morning Pages; I was already writing every day, I reasoned. Big Mistake! Now I long for it again. I’ve added it as a part of my daily routine in 2020, along with walking for an hour or more, another fun activity I have been neglecting.
The whole idea behind Freedom Lifestyle is to do what you enjoy doing. Very often, in pursuit of money, the things that give us joy are the first casualties. I don’t know why that is but, try as much as I do, I fall into that trap.
Well, I am calling it quits, because it’s B.S. No more giving up the things I love. After all, the whole purpose of making money is to be able to live the life we want.
Here are three of the stories from my book that I shared on Medium.
