Do Your Morning Pages
When I started my grad school, I was asked to submit an idea for my thesis project, but I couldn’t come up with anything. I knew the areas I wanted to focus on but the idea itself was no where to be found. “I have too many things on my mind,” I told my program director. “What is that something that only you can create?” He said. Duh, if I knew that, I would have already created it, I wanted to say, but instead I said, “I need help.”
He suggested that I read The Artist’s Way, the quasi-spiritual manual for “creative recovery,” as its author Julia Cameron puts it. This books has helped millions of blocked writers and other artistic hopefuls for more than a quarter of a century. Elizabeth Gilbert has done the book three times, “there would be no Eat, Pray, Love without The Artist’s Way,” she once said.
If it worked for Elizabeth Gilbert, it’ll work for me, I thought, and borrowed a copy from the library.
The book follows a 12-week creative process, to help remove artistic blocks and foster confidence. One of the book’s central exercises is The Morning Pages - it requires you write three pages, by hand (no, you can’t type it,) first thing in the morning, about whatever comes to mind.
These are your private pages, you don’t share it with anyone, you don’t judge what comes out of you, you just write. Later when you review those pages, you’ll discover some gems, patterns, ideas, secrets about your genius that you never knew before. So, in the first few months of my grad school, I did my morning pages, every single day, and one day it all clicked. The idea was there and I couldn’t believe it. It was perfect for something only I could have created. Long story short, based on that idea, I developed a massive transmedia project that included a TV series, an online graphic novel, augmented reality game, and much much more. That project got me the Innovative Storyteller’s Award, and put me on the Top 30 Under 30 List.
I am a big fan of Julia Cameron. No wonder, I have been doing these morning pages for the last 15 years, and they never cease to amaze me. If you feel you’re stuck creatively, you don’t know what to write, what to create, where to find the right idea, then start by reading The Artist’s Way.
