When it helps to read your old Morning Pages

Rules are (sometimes) made to be broken. Yes, even Julia Cameron's.

When I first tried to follow The Artist’s Way I thought I would have to do exactly what Julia Cameron told me to do, or it wouldn’t work. I must not look at any social media before I did my Morning Pages. I must complete every exercise because the one I have the most resistance to will probably turn out to be the life-changer. I must always have a weekly Artist Date. If I failed at any of the above, I had to ditch the whole thing and start over.

I never get beyond Week 2.

Despite buying and heavily annotating no fewer than three copies of The Artist’s Way, despite it becoming my creative touchstone for the past 23 years, I’ve always felt that I haven’t done it right. And that is because I haven’t kept all the rules.

One very definite taboo is showing your Morning Pages to anybody, or even re-reading them. I can see the rationale for that. It’s essential that you learn not to write for an audience, even if that audience is yourself. The Inner Critic is always lurking, ready to rub the edges off your passions. The process only works if it is free-flowing and uncensored. In fact, that is sound advice for the first draft of pretty much any writing project. Many of us mask our true selves, sometimes so habitually that we barely recognise them. All that must be burnt away until you can look in the paper mirror and see a new, authentic self staring back. The best way to achieve this is by not trying to achieve anything at all, other than the daily commitment to write three A4 pages in longhand, preferably at the crack of dawn.

(I broke that rule too. I’m more likely to be sitting down with a post-breakfast cup of coffee around 10.00. Whatever).

Having said all that and acknowledging its validity, I do sometimes re-read my Morning Pages. It’s not right for everyone and there was a time when it wouldn’t have been right to me; the emerging artist is a shy creature, easily scared away. But it can be a very powerful experience. In fact, I often recognise the beginning of some good writing in them, an authenticity that will, with luck, survive the revision process and maybe offer hope to others.

I woke up feeling flat this morning. I felt no desire to write at all and I could barely remember the heady days two months ago where I red Beth Kimpton’s Joy, Boats, Time and felt the pieces of my forgotten, longed-for life slot into place. Today all that felt like a distant memory, a quickly abandoned New Year’s resolution.

The past few weeks have felt like a string of negatives. I remembered the 20 mile walk in the Scottish Highlands which seemed like a great idea at the time but resulted in a filthy cold with a side order of sciatica and post-viral fatigue. I beat myself up for not contributing to discussions, dabbling in watercolours rather than the writing I’d committed myself too. For being daft enough to think booking a four-day retreat in Cornwall was anything more than self-indulgence.

I opened my journal, ready to pour all my negativity out on the page, but something made me turn instead to its opening pages when I worked through the initial questions of what I hoped to get out of Soul Circle. I looked over the promises I’d made to myself. Eat less chocolate, read more books, stop worrying about what other people think. Believe you have something to say and it’s worth spending quality time on it.

I realised that I’d actually made significant progress on several of these goals, and I’d done so by listening to my body and my heart. Rereading my Morning Pages brought those resolutions back into focus for me. My heart skipped a beat, the way it did two months ago, with the discovery of a tribe of kindred spirits, and a path towards fulfilment. Already I had blunted the edge of those emotions and pasted a carapace of cynicism over them, avoiding the challenges the questions raised.

I had been close to despair, to abandoning this journey that nobody in my life other than myself was urging me to take. Worst of all, I was falling into my old self-sabotaging habit of trying something else - something flashy on Instagram that cost money rather than the commitment to trust and time in pursuit of a goal as yet uncertain.

So I did reread my Morning Pages from those first few days when I was processing the significance of what I’d read, what I’d glimpsed, and how I had responded with an open heart and a sense of joy that had been missing from my life for a long time. The evidence of what had happened to me was crystal clear and reading it again rekindled the fire.

So, with respect, I differ from Julia Cameron on this one. Or at least I take a more nuanced view. Sometimes re-reading my Morning Pages is rocket fuel for my creativity, and exactly what I need to do.