I’ve been typing my morning pages ever since I started writing them. I sit down at my desk, open up a new note, and start typing. I scroll through all of the files occasionally and feel proud to know (and to see) that I’ve sat down every single day and written my ~750 words.
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron suggests writing morning pages by hand, but (without trying) I convinced myself that typing, for me, was better. “I don’t like my handwriting,” I told myself. “I can type at the speed of thought”, I insisted. “It will come in useful to have digital files,” I claimed month after month, with no evidence.
This morning, I sat down and challenged all of that thinking. Who cares if the handwriting isn’t good, if no one (including me) is ever going to read it? “Typing at the speed of thought” could be an unhelpful thing to do, as far as I knew. It has never—not even once—been useful to have a digital record. At times it’s been a little bit sad.
Given that, I decided to write my morning pages by hand today. I’d expected it to feel a bit like pulling teeth, but almost immediately I was overtaken by how good it felt. It felt strangely romantic (which I’m a sucker for). It took longer, but in a way that felt like a respect of the practice; respect for myself. It removed my anxieties about line length, and exact word count, and “writing things well.”
As I reflected throughout the day, I realized that I’d started to value the wrong things. I’d been more focused on ensuring there was a file for each day than whether the contents helped me in some way. I’d had mornings where I’d tried to hit 750 words as quickly as possible, rather than any number of words that actually needed to come out of me. I’d respected everything but the practice and myself.
Now, many months into my practice, I’m going to swing back the other way. I’m going to honor the practice and what it provides for me, and I’m going to let the rest fall away. I’m going to write my morning pages by hand, and I’m not going to keep them. I’m going to slow down to make sure that I’m connected with what I’m writing. I’m going to stop caring about formatting and exact word counts.
I’d been treating morning pages as “just another writing practice,” but I think they deserve a little more consideration than that. I’d been worried about how “useful” the completed writing itself would be, rather than the act of writing it. So much of what I create has some expectation of permanence; of record-keeping. I’ll embrace now the opposite: transient writing; the very act of writing itself.