In September 2022 I started writing morning pages. Three handwritten pages first thing, before coffee, before email, before I'd talked to anyone. The idea comes from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which I had avoided for years due to a general suspicion of self-help frameworks for creative practice. A friend eventually persuaded me to try it without reading the book, just the practice. I've been doing it since, with occasional gaps, and I've filled fourteen notebooks.
Here's what three years actually taught me, as opposed to what I expected it to teach me.
It didn't unblock me
The main claim for morning pages is that they clear psychological debris and unblock your "real" writing. I came in hoping for this. It didn't happen, or at least not in the way I expected. My writing blocks — and I have them, like everyone — didn't dissolve. The morning pages became a parallel practice, not a clearing mechanism. On the days when I couldn't write fiction, I still couldn't write fiction after the pages. What the pages gave me instead was a record of what the block felt like, which turned out to be more useful than unblocking would have been.
It gave me access to a different register
This is the thing I didn't anticipate. The pages are written before the internal editor is fully awake. They're sloppy, repetitive, sometimes embarrassing to re-read. But they're also, occasionally, precise in a way that my deliberate writing isn't. Ideas appear in them that I wouldn't have arrived at through conscious effort — not because the subconscious is wiser than the conscious mind, but because the looseness of the form allows a different kind of movement.
I've taken sentences from the morning pages and used them almost verbatim in finished work. Not often — maybe ten or fifteen times in three years — but each time it happened the sentence was better than anything I'd have written with my deliberate mind, and I'm not sure I'd have found it any other way.
It is a record, not a resource
I don't re-read the pages regularly. I go back to them occasionally, maybe three or four times a year, and mine them for material. What I find more valuable is the simple fact of their existence — fourteen notebooks that prove I was present and working, that track my preoccupations across three years, that show me patterns I couldn't see while I was inside them.
Looking back at 2022–23, for example, I can see that I was circling a particular problem — something about permanence, about what survives — for almost eighteen months before I found the story that let me address it directly. The pages didn't give me the story. But they show me its approach, like watching weather develop over water.
It changed how I start the day
More than anything else, the practice changed the quality of the first hour. Not because the writing itself is valuable — most of it isn't — but because it establishes a particular mode of attention before the day's ordinary demands begin. You've been alone with language for twenty or thirty minutes. You've tracked your own thoughts across three pages. The writing brain is awake in a way it isn't when you start by reading email.
This effect is real and I don't want to overstate it, but it's the reason I've continued. On the days I skip, there's a flatness to the first few hours of work that I've come to attribute to the absence of that early engagement. It could be habit rather than necessity. Probably it's both.
The notebooks themselves
Fourteen notebooks in three years. I use unlined paper because lines make me write in lines, which makes me think in lines. I write with a fountain pen because the resistance of the nib slows me down just enough. The physical specifics matter more than they should — I know this — but I've stopped fighting it. The right conditions are part of the practice.
I'll keep doing it. I don't know what it's doing for me that I can't see yet, but I trust the accumulation of evidence: I'm a better first-draft writer than I was in 2022, more willing to follow a sentence into darkness, less frightened of the blank page. Whether the pages caused that or just ran alongside it, I don't know. But correlation over three years is enough for me.