Turn Your “I Want to Be a Writer” Dream into a Writing Habit
Step One — Practice this method first.
If you are having trouble writing, this one practice will turn your “I want to be a writer” dream into a writing habit and possibly a way to make money online.
Realize your goals through action.
OK. You want to be a writer. If you write emails, Insta captions, or Facebook blurbs for friends and family, you’re already a writer.
“All lives are writers’ lives because all of us are writers.” — Julia Cameron, The Writer’s Life
No, you say? You want to make money from writing. Well, then, my friend, you need a habit.
One great painless trick to get into the habit of writing is Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages practice.
What are Morning Pages?
The practice of Morning Pages is a clearing exercise done each morning upon waking.
Here is a description from Julia Cameron on her website, explaining the method.
Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. *There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages*– they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page…and then do three more pages tomorrow.
The beautiful thing about Morning Pages is there is no wrong way to do them, and you don’t have to edit for grammar or spelling. You just write. Not having to worry about grammar and spelling is freeing for me as a writer.
Each morning for three months, I practiced morning pages, and the results were compelling. The most important one being, the practice formed my writing habit.
I woke a bit earlier to get it done, but not much earlier. Three pages go fast.
There is something magical about creating a little solo space for yourself while the world and your family sleeps. Pour yourself some coffee, crack open your notebook and enjoy the silence of the early morning while you write.
There are many positive things the Morning Pages practice accomplishes:
- It clears negative thoughts
- It gets you writing
- And what I found to be the most important is that it forms a habit.
The Morning Pages method was the beginning of my writing practice.
The first part of establishing a habit is the showing up part. When you show up daily to do something — even if only for ten minutes — a habit forms. This goes for bad habits as well.
How long do you think it will take you to write out three pages longhand each morning? Not very long. Under an hour. Rarely will you have trouble thinking of things to write about first thing upon waking. Being close to the dream state when we wake; our subconscious is still in overdrive.
Excellence is an art won by training and habitualization. We are what we repeatedly do. Aristotle said it best, “Excellence is not an art, but a habit.”
Morning Pages takes the pressure off of aiming for perfection. If you are writing with perfection in mind, you won’t ever start, and if you do start, you won’t ever share publicly. Your writing will most likely never see the light of day. It will die on your hard drive.
There will never be the perfect book, manuscript, screenplay, blog post.
Perfectionism holds us back and down and is often another form of procrastination. Since nothing ever can be perfect, it’s reaching for the impossible. Striving for excellence is different. Striving for excellence is the pursuit of goals within our reach through persistence, consistency, and hard work.
When we show up consistently, that is the beginning of a real-life shift.
In Julia Cameron’s book, The Writer’s Life,” she writes,
Making writing a big deal tends to make writing difficult. Keeping writing casual tends to keep it possible. Nowhere is this more true than around the issue of time. One of the biggest myths about writing is that in order to do it, we must have great swathes of uninterrupted time.
I have found this to be true. You would be surprised how much you can write in even 30 minutes or less.
One of my first successful blog posts on this platform took me under an hour to write. You can read it below.
And, I barely edited it.
It took such a short time to write because I was familiar with the content, I had practiced Morning Pages, and I turned off all distractions: physical and mental ones.
When you perform Morning Pages each morning it is like a brain dump.
You’re dumping all your worries and anxieties onto the page. Freeing up mental energy to have more room for creativity. After practicing Morning Pages, I can sit down and type out 1,000 words in 30 to 45 minutes when I’m focused and have a topic in mind.
This is what Morning Pages did for me —
- Helped me unlock my subconscious. Having permission to write freely without editing for grammar or spelling allowed me to write quickly without censorship. Writing as close to waking in the morning allowed me to write from as close to the dream state as possible and tap my subconscious for ideas.
- It significantly reduces my anxiety and stress for the rest of the day.
- Writing in a stream of consciousness style had a similarly relaxing effect on my thoughts as meditation does. Morning Pages are a meditative process. It makes sense the calming of the mind would be one benefit to come from this practice. It is a great way to rid your mind of anxiety-inducing thoughts like lists and what needs to be done for the day ahead of you. Even though it takes time to write out three pages longhand, it added time to my day because purging my worries and overwhelm made me more focused. I get more tasks finished with focused energy. When you are no longer in the prison of overthinking, your mind is free to concentrate on the moment. It shifted my perspective. The energy of my day changed significantly from overthinking to balance and presence.
- Helped me to discover my creativity. Writing freely generated ideas and broke through creative blocks. Stream of consciousness writing unearthed a nugget or two of interesting ideas each morning, which I could expand on in my writing as a way to generate ideas for blog posts.
- Silenced my inner critic. You know the one, the loud, obnoxious writer-critic in all of us, the one that sometimes creeps in with, “you aren’t’ good enough. So many writers are better than you. Hang I up, kid.”
- Most importantly, it helped me create a regular writing habit that was painless and enjoyable, a writing habit I have stuck with to the present and am now making money from.
As Julia Cameron writes in The Writer’s Life, “When we love our writing, we find time for it. The trick to finding writing time, then, is to write from love and not with an eye to produce.”
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
