What I write when no one is watching

Lessons from one year of morning pages

Last year I wrote 1,802 pages that no one will ever see.

They were journal entries, scrawled into the 200 page, $1.29 Composition Notebooks I picked from the Dollar Express on 8th Avenue. For 15 years, I’ve been trying my hand at a consistent journal practice, and this was the first year I pulled it off. I learned a lot.

I’d journaled for most of my adult life—extending back to my Livejournal days, when I traveled to Istanbul as a Rotary exchange student and chronicled my stumblings around Turkey and Egypt for my friends back in Texas. Back then, I wrote with the awareness that I wasn’t just writing for self-reflection—writing was a performance, meant to charm or entertain or garner sympathy (still working on this one…progress, not perfection). I didn’t imagine there was much utility in writing that nobody witnessed. Like, if a 17 year old writes in a notebook and nobody is around to read it, does it even make a sound?

Then I went to college and started writing songs. I transitioned from the private, to the public, going from writing for myself in the quiet of my dorm to performing at open mics, then paid gigs. At 21, I was introduced to a record producer in Kentucky, and he encouraged me to build a body of work worthy of a record. Almost immediately, my joyful late-night songwriting sessions were spoiled by apprehension. Was I a songwriter, even? Were my songs any good? How could they get better?

I hit a wall, and for months, I didn’t write much more than a verse. 

“Have you tried morning pages?” my friend Jake asked listening to me complain through half a beach trip. He encouraged me to grab a copy of The Artist’s Way. That’s when I discovered the writing routine that would change my creative life.

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Written by playwright Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way is a 12-week, self-guided course intended to reconnect blocked artists (and “non-artists”) with their creative life. It is, in some sense, an act of recovery—Cameron herself is sober and loosely based the process on the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Morning pages, like recovery meetings, act as the touchstone of that practice.

The idea behind morning pages is simple: Every day upon waking, sit down and write three long-form pages. Doesn’t matter what. For all Cameron and the muses care, write “this is slow torture” until you hit the bottom of page three. The point is: Show up, shake off the figurative cobwebs, and get on with it. 

Casino is big on creative recovery

Later that year, I finished the The Artist’s Way and recorded my first album. Morning pages were my companion throughout—a signal to myself that I was committed to doing what it took to make something, anything. Over the years, I’d revisit the book anytime I hit a creative standstill. Mostly, I turned to morning pages. They acted as my pressure-release valve through the turbulent highs and lows of record releases, breakups, endorsement deals, and cross-country moves. I couldn’t control a lot, but I could show up to the page.

Then, at 32, I hung my songwriter hat and got a full-time job. I was in a writing program, constructing stories to try to wow my classmates and professors. Morning pages fell by the wayside. Sometimes, on the ferry to work, I’d tap out the happenings of my day on my laptop, or jot bullet points on the legal pad in-between my Trader Joe’s grocery list and To Do list. As every New Year approached, I thought, with a wistful longing of finally calling that old friend: This will be the year I will morning page. Every year, I let life happen.

Then, during the pandemic I started a Therapeutic Writing Group for trauma survivors at my job. During one of our freewriting sessions, a group member said something that knocked me over the head: Every time I write, I write like somebody is watching.

Writing had become a performance. How could I get back to writing that felt honest?

Then, in late 2022, I had a major breakdown, and something in me snapped. After editing dozens of essays into infinitum, I decided to put creative work out into the world. Morning pages would be the foundation of that practice, a place just for me. After one year of consistent morning pages, here is what I discovered:

Time 

On days I didn’t want to write, my excuse was almost always some version of “not enough time.” I’m not going to sit here and say this isn’t real—folks have kids, jobs, caretaking responsibilities. Time is a privilege. For much of last year, I was a full-time grad student, professor, and nonprofit consultant (30 hours per week), so many days, scrounging up time to reflect was hard. But, as my first writing teacher Dean Adams told me, anyone can find 5 minutes. 

Some mornings, I set a 10-minute timer, and that’s all I got. Some days I had oceans of time and set a 15-minute timer anyway. It tricks my anxiety—I can tolerate anything (non-life threatening) for 15 minutes. Usually, by the time the timer had gone off, I’d hit a flow, and if I could afford it, I kept going.

I wrote at my desk, on the crowded 6 train, or in the English Department faculty lounge at 5pm, scarfing down discount sushi. Sometimes I don’t get to my pages until right before bed. On good days, I catch myself doomscrolling on the couch and ask—have you written yet? If the answer is No, I grab my notebook, set a timer for 5 minutes, and go.  

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Practice

I used to journal on my laptop, either in my Notes App or by emailing each entry to a dedicated email address. This is hugely beneficial if you want a searchable way to reference the material later. However, I noticed that my most content days didn’t begin with me staring at a screen. They always included some version of me, sitting in the quiet, journaling in a notebook. So last year, I committed to journaling in a notebook.

I used to go all-out for the fancy notebooks, but that felt too high-pressure. Instead, I bought two copies of the same composition notebook from the corner store, an idea I got from Isle McElroy, who wrote the first draft of their second novel, People Collide in much the same way. I loved knowing I had a dedicated place to journal, in my dumb little wide-ruled notebook. More importantly, the notebook provided a visual cue: I left it on my kitchen table each night before bed or stuck it in my backpack on days I taught early. Now, when I finish a notebook, I stack it on the bookshelf directly above my writing desk and go to the corner store for a new one. Each time the stack extends, my sense of integrity grows with it. I’ve kept this simple promise to myself.

One year’s worth of scribbles

Julia Cameron insists Morning Pages should be written before anything else. That isn’t practical for me, a person tenuously balancing sleep and animals and friends and jobs. On a good day, I walk the dog, get home, brew coffee and oatmeal, anxiously check and then ignore my inbox, then finally, finally put my phone in DnD and sit down at my table to write. Other days, I write on the Subway, and that’s fine.

Sometimes the trick to building a practice is to set the bar so incredibly low it’s on the floor.

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Purpose

My journal entries are humiliating. Almost every one begins with some variation of “i am ANXIOUS.” This is the entire purpose of the morning page—shake loose those petty resentments, existential angst, and invisible arguments with your ex—and eventually, maybe, organize your thoughts and your day. 

Most importantly, journaling provides a sense of momentum. Most days, I don’t want to sit with my thoughts; it’s kind of a circus up there. Morning pages give me—a chronically worried person—my first opportunity to prioritize action before feeling. 

And while the point of morning pages isn’t to create content that’ll turn into published writing, many times, they do. My notebook is an incubator. It’s where, for many months, I kicked around the idea of starting this newsletter. Then last year, on a cross-country drive over Christmas, I got hit with the opening line of my first story. The next morning, snowed-in and lonely in Nashville, I sat down with my composition book and morning paged the first draft. 

So, yes, morning pages provide an avenue for low-stakes writing. But they also help me reconnect with my intuition and sense of possibility. They remind me of the things I care about when there’s no audience to perform for.

What might you discover matters to you when no one is watching?

Warmest,
Aly