What Morning Pages Actually Are
Okay. How are you doing, actually? Before we get into it.
I ask because this lesson is the one where people either relax or panic, and I want to know which one I'm dealing with. 😊
So. Morning pages. You've probably heard the term somewhere, maybe from the same corner of the internet where I first heard it — I was reading a hiking blog, of all things, mostly to distract myself from being tired, and there it was. Morning pages. I tried them because I needed somewhere to put my complaining before my shift at Balefire, not because I thought it'd fix anything.
Here's what they actually are, stripped of any mystique: three pages, written by hand, first thing in the morning, before your brain has had a chance to get organized and polite about itself.
That's it. That's the whole concept.
Why "before your brain gets organized" matters
The point isn't to write something good. It's to write before the part of you that edits and judges and worries about spelling has fully woken up. You're basically getting the words out while your inner critic is still hitting snooze.
Which means morning pages are allowed to be bad. Encouraged to be bad, honestly. Repetitive, whiny, boring, a grocery list with feelings attached. All of that counts. I've told you before, complaining onto paper counts as journaling. It's not a lesser form of it. Sometimes getting the bad thoughts out of your skull so you can function is the whole win for the day.
How to actually do it at home
Here's what I'd try, and adjust as you go:
- Keep the notebook somewhere you'll see it before coffee. Nightstand, kitchen counter, wherever you land first. If you have to go hunting for it, you won't do it.
- Write as soon as you reasonably can after waking up. You don't have to do it in bed at 5 a.m. like some purists insist. I do mine most days with coffee in reach, still in my robe, before I've talked to another human. That's the spirit of it — before the day gets its hooks in you.
- Three pages, roughly. Don't get religious about the exact count. Some mornings I run long, some mornings I peter out at a page and a half because I've got nothing. Both are fine.
- Don't reread as you go. Just keep the pen moving. If you stop to fix a sentence you've broken the whole point of the exercise.
- Let it be boring. This is the part people fight me on. They think if it's not insightful it doesn't count. It counts. Some of my most useless-sounding pages turned out to matter later, and some of my "deep" ones were just me being dramatic about traffic.
One caution, and it's a small one: if you're someone who tends to spiral when you write about hard stuff, don't do morning pages as your only outlet, especially if there's something heavy going on. Pair it with talking to an actual person too. Paper's good for a lot of things, it's not a substitute for a friend or a professional when things are really hard.
What they're not
Morning pages aren't a diary of events. You're not required to record what happened yesterday. They're more like clearing your throat on paper before you try to say anything real.
They're also not a place you have to finish everything. I want to tell you about a night I wrote a whole entry as a letter to my mother. I got most of the way through it and then just... couldn't finish. My hand stopped. I sat there looking at the blank space where the rest of the letter should've gone, and I almost tore the page out because it felt incomplete, like a failure.
I didn't tear it out. I left it. And now, when I flip back to it, that blank space is part of the entry. It says something a finished paragraph never could have. Some mornings you won't get to the bottom of what you meant to say. Leave the gap. It's not a mistake, it's just where you were that day.
Before next time
Try one morning of this before our next lesson — doesn't have to be tomorrow, doesn't have to be perfect, just three pages or as close as you get, written before you've had a chance to think too hard about it.