Magic Morning Pages

The trepidation I have around writing is most intense when I'm not writing at all. The simple, inconvenient truth is that the best cure for writer's block is to write. My producer on the hockey pilot, himself a writer, said this to me one day: "Just write through it." That's very irritating to hear when I'm reveling in the worst of my anxiety. Just write through it? That's the thing I can't do! Isn't there a pill for this instead?

I did try anxiety pills when worst turned to worstest, and they were helpful in the short term, but later I found a natural cure: Morning Pages. Write three pages of anything, first thing in the morning - or, as I modified it, first thing in my writing session, whatever the time of day. Whatever's top of mind, scribble it out. I think that Natalie Goldberg prescribes something similar in Writing Down the Bones, but I'd lost the habit along the way somewhere.

I got a cheap Hilroy ring notebook that reminded me of high school and a good pen. (I suspect all writers get a writing boner from a good pen. Black Staples OptiFlows have been giving me my thrills for months now.) As Julia Cameron advises in The Artist's Way, I set the bar low: it wouldn't matter if I wrote "the quick brown fox" over and over until I'd filled three pages. But as it happened, I never needed to do that. I just wrote about whatever was on my mind.

The other day, I read about a psychologist who says the best way to offload anxiety is to write about it, and I've found this to be true with my Morning Pages. Usually before the end of three pages, I've aired my fearful thoughts -- which always look more innocuous on the page than they seem when they're niggling around in  my head -- and also decided how I want to attack them in practical terms.

Yesterday, for example, after half an hour of Morning Pages, I'd prioritized my projects and set my writing goals for the day. By the time I started writing, the anxiety that had built up over the past weeks of not writing was mostly gone, leaving me to get on with the work, cured for another day!