Unlock Your Creative Genius by Writing Three Pages of Nonsense Each Morning—Here’s Why It Works Magic
In response, I went back to a practice I had many years ago: Free-writing. Before my page-writing sessions, I opened a Word document and just typed. Ten minutes. Whatever emerged from my fingers on keyboard.
I was reminded of this approach by an article I had stashed in my files: Why You Should Write Three Pages of Garbage Every Morning. Here are two benefits as cited in the article:
1. You get to see what’s going on in your brain. This is a cousin of mindfulness meditation, but where at least traditional mindfulness meditation is about practicing focus — on your breath, an object, or a mantra, for example — while you notice your thoughts bubbling up and let them pass, morning pages emphasizes the noticing-your-thoughts part. Three pages is long enough that you’ll get through the things you knew were on your mind and still have more to go. Seeing what comes up can be surprisingly informative. And as you capture your flitting thoughts, all that flitting starts to settle down.
2. You practice putting words down without stopping to evaluate them. There is nothing more crippling to a creative impulse than worrying about whether its result will be good. Whether that creative act is an essay, a painting, or a PowerPoint presentation for your boss, it’s all the same — evaluation is the enemy of creation. And freewriting forces you to keep moving forward, keep creating, without a thought given to quality. Quality has nothing to do with morning pages — no one’s going to read this, probably not even your future self. You just keep writing. It’ll be surprisingly hard to turn off your inner critic. But it’s vital and valuable practice.
There is a significant side benefit as well. Check out this excerpt from a May 2017 interview I did with screenwriter-director Robin Swicord:
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