Friday Challenge: Morning Pages
The Trick Artists Use to Keep Creating.
Maybe you are too shy to call yourself an artist. Perhaps you are still working up the courage to call yourself creative.
But our economy rewards creativity and being part of the creative class. The notion that creativity belongs to one special group is outdated. Everyone is creative. It’s in our nature. You need only look at toddlers at play to see how creativity emanates from us all.
That idea that wants to burst out of your head and into the world is the creative impulse itself. It is the life force of the universe. It wants to move itself through YOU.
Almost everything we do is unconscious — we just tell ourselves it’s not. Your creative juice is the magic that bursts forth from that unconscious force stirring within you.
So how do you give it a voice?
Julia Cameron wrote The Artist’s Way more than 25 years ago. And the book’s central practice still holds. The way to give your subconscious a voice is to write your morning pages every day.
Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. *There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages* — they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page…and then do three more pages tomorrow.
Our partner Gibran X. Rivera has been doing it for years:
“I drop off from time to time, but I just keep coming back. It is a practice that works. I am currently in the midst of one of the most creative periods of my life, and I’ve barely missed a day.”
So here is your Friday Challenge for this week:
- Find 15–20 quiet minutes for yourself each day this weekend. Perhaps right after you wake up. Perhaps steal a few moments on a park bench. Be deliberate about making this time for you alone.
- Take out 3 pieces of paper from the printer or that notebook you keep in your bag.
- Write your morning pages: Three pages, free writing, whatever comes out, for the next three days (or at least three days this week).
Do it and let us know how it goes. We’ll be doing the same.
