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Someone asked me a question recently.
Do I have to write morning pages as soon as I get up in the morning? Or can I have breakfast or something like that before doing it?
My view is the longer you leave it, the less likely it is that you’re going to get what morning pages really have to offer: insights from the unconscious mind.
The more likely it is that you’ll think.
The more likely it is that you’ll encounter other people and be subject to external influences and inputs.
The more likely it is that you’re going to be what I think of as polluted by the day.
The ideal time to write morning pages is as soon as possible after waking up, before your conscious mind kicks in.
I read somewhere it should be within 45 minutes of waking. I think that you should aim to have them finished within 45 minutes of waking.
Three sides of A5 or B5. It’s not a lot, but it does have a lot of potential.
If you really can’t do your pages first thing in the morning, at least do them after sleep.
This doesn’t have to be a long nap, say 10 or 20 minutes or so.
Think of it as a reboot for the mind.
And then you write your three pages and you see what comes out.
If you can’t even spare that long, then you could try a technique that Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali used to use.
They’d sit in a chair holding a spoon or a ball or something like that, and when they’d drift off to sleep, they’d drop this thing and it’d wake them up.
They would then be at what’s called the N1 sleep stage. A sort of semi-lucid state between sleep and wakefulness. A point at which we can make weird connections that really aren’t possible when we’re actively thinking about stuff.
Last week I did an experiment with my morning pages.
My wife had gone away for a few days, so I thought I’d try doing my morning pages again as soon as I woke up.
What I found was this.
The writing that came out was much more raw.
A lot of it was almost illegible! But that’s okay: this isn’t meant to be a work of art. It’s raw material – or at least has the potential to be.
You could have this in your hand and still not be able to read it. I can barely read it!
But I’ve got this stuff out of my head, and I’ve used the bits that I’ve marked in the margin as striking me as being potentially important.
And what happened was that things kept coming to me afterwards, as I was brushing my teeth and stuff like that.
What this exercise demonstrated to me is that writing this stuff as soon as possible after sleep has a distinct advantage.
I think a common misconception about morning pages is that they’ll offer something life-changing immediately.
That wisdom and insight from the unconscious mind will be delivered like a glorious gift from the heavens.
It’s not like that.
What morning pages do is much more subtle.
I get something from my morning pages pretty much every day. It might only be a sentence or two, but I do get something.
It’s a bit like panning for gold in a river: you get nothing for ages, but then sometimes there are some real nuggets.
I really feel this is a daily practice. If you dip in and out, do a day here and a day there, this isn’t going to work in the way that you might want it to.
Think of it in the same way that an athlete trains. You’re going to flex that mental muscle.
And over time, this will become easier.
Morning pages aren’t magic.
But they can be magical.
Let’s say you’re struggling to write your morning pages first thing, or you don’t feel it would really make that much difference to do them early in the day.
I want you to try something for me.
And if you do this, you’ll feel the difference and be able to judge for yourself whether it’s worth the effort.
What I want you to do is this.
One day you write your morning pages as early in the day as possible – like it says on the tin! You might have to get up a bit earlier than usual, not long, say half an hour?
And if you find morning pages difficult anyway, or you’d like to write to a prompt, you could start by asking yourself a question.
Something like:
What do I want?
Where do I want to be?
Who do I want to be?
And then you don’t think, you just follow the writing.
So you’ve done your pages in the morning, like it says on the tin. The next day, you do them in the evening. And then you can compare the pages you wrote in the morning with the pages you wrote in the evening.
And not just what came out, but how you felt.
I think what you’ll find the stuff you do in the morning is a lot freer.
It feels different.
As I found, much more raw.
Let me know how you get on in the comments: I’m really interested to discover how you found this.
If you’re interested in all this stuff, I’m producing online courses 🎓! The first is called Writing for Wellbeing. You can sign up here for news, updates and early bird discounts.
I’m a published novelist, writer, editor and Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow with 30 years’ experience across business, fiction, other non-fiction, scriptwriting and education.
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Martin Sketchley 