Writing
Morning pages
Morning pages means writing three pages by hand every morning, about anything on your mind. Nobody reads them, and they do not have to be good. The idea comes from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. For many people they take about half an hour.
Last updated
Reviewed by Mohammed Raqeeb
What they are
What are morning pages?
Morning pages are a simple writing habit. Every morning, soon after you wake up, you fill three pages by hand with whatever is in your head. Nobody reads them. They do not have to be good, and they do not even have to make sense.
The idea comes from Julia Cameron, a writer and teacher. She put it in her book The Artist’s Way (Cameron, 1992). The four rules below come from her website (Julia Cameron’s website).
Rule one
Three pages
You count pages, not minutes. You stop at the end of the third page. That can take fifteen minutes or fifty.
Rule two
By hand
You use a pen and paper, not a keyboard. That is how her website describes the pages.
Rule three
In the morning
You write soon after you wake up, before the day gets busy.
Rule four
About anything
There is no topic, and nobody checks it. Complaints, plans, a dream, the weather, the same worry as yesterday.
Her website has two more rules (the guidelines on her website). Do not show your pages to anyone. And do not read them back until later in her course.
How to start
How do you start morning pages?
To start morning pages tomorrow, you need a notebook, a pen and about half an hour. Three things make it easier.
Put the notebook and pen out the night before.
An open notebook on the table is easy to start. Looking for a pen while you are half asleep is not.
Go to bed half an hour earlier.
The half hour has to come from somewhere. If you do not go to bed earlier, it comes out of your sleep.
If you miss a morning, just write the next one.
Do not write six pages to catch up. Her own guidelines say it is okay to slip (the guidelines on her website).
What if you cannot think of anything? Write “I cannot think of anything” and keep the pen moving until a new thought comes. And if three empty pages feel like too much, the morning journal prompts give you one question at a time.
How long
How long do morning pages take?
Morning pages take about half an hour for many people. Your own time depends on two things: how fast you write, and how many words fit on one of your pages. The calculator below works it out for you.
How fast do you write by hand?
Most people do not know their speed, so start with a guess. About average is near what students wrote in one study (22.85 words a minute). Slowly and quickly are our rough guesses.
How big is your notebook?
How many words fit on a page is our rough guess for each size.
Three pages take you
33m
750 words in all. If you start at , you finish the third page at .
Page one
done at
Page two
done at
Page three
done at
- One week
- 3h 48m
- Writing every morning, weekends too.
- The 12-week course
- 46h
- If you never miss a morning.
Morning pages: three pages, about 33m, from to .
This is an estimate from your two numbers. Copying a text is faster than writing your own words, so a real morning may take longer. Nothing you enter leaves this page.
Where “half an hour” comes from.
In one study, university students copied a text by hand at 22.85 words a minute on average (Franzsen and Stewart, 2014). Say one of your pages holds 250 words. Three pages are then 750 words. At about 23 words a minute, that takes about 33 minutes.
A real morning may take longer. The students were copying, and people copy faster than they write their own words (Burger and McCluskey, 2011).
What studies say
Do morning pages work?
Nobody has tested morning pages in a study, as far as we could find. We searched a large online collection of research papers. No paper there had the words “morning pages” in its title or in its short summary (Europe PMC). Studies have tested smaller kinds of writing. Two of them come close.
A to-do list before bed.
People wrote for 5 minutes before they went to sleep. Those who listed things they still had to do fell asleep faster than those who listed things they had already finished (Scullin and colleagues, 2018). That was one night, at bedtime.
A plan for a task you have not finished.
In experiments, an unfinished task kept coming back into people’s thoughts while they tried to read something else. When they first made a clear plan for the task, the thoughts stopped (Masicampo and Baumeister, 2011). A plan for one task is not the same as writing whatever comes to mind.
So nobody knows yet if three pages every morning make you calmer or more creative. That does not mean they do nothing. It means you have to check the result yourself.
Freewriting
What is freewriting, and how is it different?
Freewriting means writing without stopping for a set number of minutes. You do not fix anything, and you can write about any topic. A writing teacher named Peter Elbow made it well known in his book Writing Without Teachers (Elbow, 1973).
The main difference is how you count. Freewriting is counted in minutes, so it ends when the clock says so. Morning pages are counted in pages, so a slow morning takes longer.
The test
How do you know morning pages are working?
The test
You wrote three pages on at least five mornings a week, and you can say in one sentence what changed for you
for four weeks in a row.
Morning pages take about half an hour every morning. No study has tested them, so the way to know if they are worth it is to look at your own weeks.
A good way to check counts the minutes from what you already write or say about your day. You should not have to start a timer before you pick up the pen. Most journaling apps save how the morning felt. They do not show the half hour itself, or whether you took it from your sleep.
One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.
You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: your writing, sleep, work, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. It also has morning and evening journals with daily prompts, for the days when a question is easier than an empty page. Your three pages can be a morning habit with a reminder. When what you write about your day shows you wrote them, the app ticks it off and your streak goes on.
1. You write your day
2. It counts the hours
- Morning pages0m
- Work0m
- Sleep0m
- Unaccounted24h
3. It shows your week
Morning pages this week: 0m
On 6 of 7 days. The gap is the day without it.
An example day and week.
For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.
Sources
Where do the facts on this page come from?
Every number and finding on this page links to one of the sources below. We read each study for this page, the whole text or its summary. The two books are here only to show where the ideas come from. We did not read them from cover to cover.
- Cameron, J. (1992). The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Jeremy P. Tarcher (the publisher’s page for the 30th anniversary edition).
- Julia Cameron Live, the author’s website (read ). Julia Cameron Live: the basic tools.
- Julia Cameron Live, the author’s website (read ). Commonly asked questions.
- Franzsen, D. and Stewart, A. (2014). Identifying the factors that contribute to hand writing problems experienced by students at a higher education institution in South Africa. South African Journal of Occupational Therapy, 44(1).
- Burger, D. K. and McCluskey, A. (2011). Australian norms for handwriting speed in healthy adults aged 60-99 years. Australian Occupational Therapy Journal, 58(5), 355 to 363.
- Europe PMC, European Bioinformatics Institute (read ). Search for “morning pages” in the titles and abstracts of indexed papers.
- Scullin, M. K., Krueger, M. L., Ballard, H. K., Pruett, N. and Bliwise, D. L. (2018). The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep: A polysomnographic study comparing to-do lists and completed activity lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(1), 139 to 146.
- Masicampo, E. J. and Baumeister, R. F. (2011). Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667 to 683.
- Elbow, P. (1973). Writing Without Teachers. Oxford University Press, New York (pages 1 to 7, as excerpted by the University of California, Santa Barbara).
Keep reading.
- LearnAnswers about sleep, habits, study, people and work, in hours.
- How to write betterSeven steps to clearer writing, one short note rewritten twice, and what studies found helps.
- Morning promptsPrompts for the start of the day, from last night's sleep to the first hour.
- What to write in a journalIdeas for what to write, and why the details are worth it.
- Where did my week go? calculatorEnter a typical day and see your week accounted and unaccounted.
- Time journalingThe method: write or say your day in your own words, then see it as hours.
Questions
Questions people ask.
What are morning pages?
Morning pages means writing three pages by hand every morning, about anything that is on your mind. The idea comes from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. Nobody else reads the pages, and they do not have to be good.
How long do morning pages take?
About half an hour for many people. It depends on how fast you write and how big your pages are. At about 23 words a minute, three pages of 250 words each take about 33 minutes.
Do morning pages have to be handwritten?
Julia Cameron’s website says they are written by hand. Most people type faster than they write, so three typed pages hold more words. If a keyboard is the way you will really do it, then type, and see what it does for you.
Is freewriting the same as morning pages?
No. Freewriting means writing without stopping for a set number of minutes. Morning pages are three pages every morning, however long they take. In both, you keep the pen moving and nobody reads what you wrote.
Is there proof that morning pages work?
Not that we could find. No study we found tested morning pages. Studies have tested smaller kinds of writing, such as a to-do list before bed. So the way to know is to try the pages for four weeks and see.
Try it on my day.
Write today down in your own words, and see where the hours went.
For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.