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Tag: morning pages

December 31, 2022

Seeing out 2022

Hello again. It’s the semi-obligatory end of year post. Thanks to the semester break in my academic year, I’m even more prone than the average person to take stock of the calendar year that’s ending and think about tweaks large and small to the way I do things. I used to write a year-in-reading post on the blog, with the productivity post coming in January. But given my sparse blogging over the last couple of years and my almost-as-sparse reading, I figured I’d do what I did last year and combine them.

READING

I read more than last year, thank goodness. I managed 30 books this year, which is still a low number by my historical standards but better than the 18 (!) I read last year. My early reading was shaped by a presentation I gave on the works of Arundhati Roy, which led me to read more of her nonfiction and revisit her two novels. I was lucky enough to meet her in person when she came to St. Louis, and what a lovely opportunity that was. She is gracious, soft-spoken, and fierce, and I felt fortunate to have the chance to talk with her after reading her work for so many years. Her Booker-winning novel is better known and more widely praised, but my personal favorite is The Ministry of Utmost Happiness; it throws you into the middle of Old Delhi and takes you all over the map emotionally, geographically, and sociologically. It’s not as “polished” as The God of Small Things, but it immerses you just as thoroughly in a world. I also strongly recommend sampling her nonfiction, which is quite different but excellent for the myriad insights she provides into contemporary India.

There wasn’t much of a pattern to my reading, although in looking at my chronological list I went back and forth between reading literary fiction and taking a break with mysteries (Simenon, Mick Herron, and le Carré, Higashino and Kirino in translation) and romance/romantic novels (a few Burchells and the latest Sarah Morgan). The only non-work nonfiction I read was Adrian Tempany’s And the Sun Shines Now, which is about the Hillsborough disaster (Tempany is a Hillsborough survivor) and the search for justice as well as the corporatization of football that characterizes the modern game. It’s a bit disjointed at times but very worth reading.

In literary fiction I had a few standouts:

  • Telephone by Percival Everett (Version B, I think?)
  • A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark
  • Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
  • The Paper Lantern by Will Burns
  • Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham.
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June 14, 2016

Life Noble Note notebook and TWSBI Eco update

I used up the last few pages of the Muji lined notebook I’d been using for morning pages and started a new-to-me notebook, made by the Life Stationery Company in Japan. The company has been around since 1946 and makes a range of products. These notebooks are available at a variety of online retailers, but I hate buying notebooks sight unseen. Luckily for me, my somewhat local Japanese stationery store stocks them and I picked up the plain version a few months ago. I’ve mostly used plain paper for my morning pages and I like having lots of pages, but it’s a tradeoff between a bulky notebook (my Bindewerk was 144 sheets with hard covers) vs. easy to carry but fairly quick to use up (my Muji was 72 sheets with soft covers).

 

Life Noble Note w/pen

 

The Noble Note falls somewhere between the two in terms of expense as well. I have to import the Bindewerks from Germany and the shipping gets quite high, whereas the Mujis are available locally and are at the inexpensive end of the spectrum. You can pick up a Noble Note for about $15 through Amazon (my local store charges $15.95, which I think is pretty reasonable for a small independent retailer).

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June 1, 2016

How I do morning pages

For the last year and a half I’ve been doing morning pages, a writing practice introduced in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I did them daily for the first few months of 2015, then fell off the wagon, returned in fits and starts for the rest of the year, and then committed to doing them as part of my 2016 productivity practices. I’ve written them daily (with two exceptions) since 3 January; there are a group of us on Twitter who check in with each other as well. Now that I’m on Twitter hiatus I’m not checking in but I’m still doing them.

I wanted to write about how I do them, because one thing that became clear was that the four/five/six of us on Twitter don’t all approach them the same way. Cameron is somewhat self-contradictory on whether there are rules: she says there is no “right” way to do pages, but she also says you should do them longhand and you should do them in the morning. She makes a distinction between journaling and morning pages, and she really does see them as the expression of your stream of consciousness. Her blog posts on the topic address quite a few of the questions that come up about the “best” way to do them.

My method has worked for me in part because I have followed the two basic directions, but also because they have been pretty low stress in terms of how I approach them, so even though what I write in them has changed over time, my ability and desire to write them hasn’t. I don’t always want to do them, but I know that if I’m really stuck I can just write “blah blah blah” over and over again. I haven’t done that yet, but having the option helps.

I have to do them in the morning, that much I’ve learned. It’s not just that I won’t do them later in the day, it’s that they don’t have at all the same function. My mind is in a different place at 3pm or 8pm than it is at 8am. Even doing them mid-morning rather than as soon after I wake up as is practical makes a difference in what I write and how I feel. And I really need that stream of consciousness approach. It leads to discoveries (intellectual, emotional, practical) that don’t emerge consistently any other way.

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