The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Size - Softcover

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Julia Cameron has been an active artist for more than three decades. She is the author of more than thirty books, including such bestselling works on the creative process as The Artist’s Way, Walking in This World, and Finding Water. Also a novelist, playwright, songwriter, and poet, she has multiple credits in theater, film, and television, including an episode of Miami Vice, which featured Miles Davis, and Elvis and the Beauty Queen, which starred Don Johnson. She was a writer on such movies as Taxi Driver, New York, New York, and The Last Waltz. She wrote, produced, and directed the award-winning independent feature film God's Will, which premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival, and was selected by the London Film Festival, the Munich International Film Festival, and the Women in Film Festival, among others. In addition to making films, Cameron has taught film at such diverse places as Chicago Filmmakers, Northwestern University, and Columbia College. She is also an award-winning playwright, whose work has appeared on such well-known stages as the McCarter Theater at Princeton University and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

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The First Tool: Morning Pages

The first tool of the Writing Diet is a tool I have taught many times before. It is the basic tool of creative unblocking and the basic tool of successful long-term weight loss as well. You will write three pages every morning, a practice that I call Morning Pages. They are to be strictly stream of consciousness, no "high art" here. You simply move your hand across the page and write whatever thought comes into your head. Even "non-thoughts" are fine. Don't expect or demand that you have a writing style. Any style at all will do. So fret, gripe, worry, scold—or celebrate. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages.

Your pages may sound grumpy and whiny—"I'm awake and I want to sleep two more hours. I hate my job. I hate my boss. I hate the life I have invented for myself these days." Your pages might sound anxious and scattered. You might find yourself angry or sad. It's all right. It's all right. Your job is simply to get down on the page whatever it is you are.

What you are doing with your pages is something that in 12-step parlance is called "getting current." You are out to catch up on yourself, to pinpoint precisely what you are feeling and thinking. It's an interesting phrase, "getting current." Because that is exactly what we are doing. We are tapping into the energy flow in our lives, the current of who and what we are. When I get current, I feel more alive. I know who I am and what I want more of and what I want less of. Writing Morning Pages, I tap into a creative energy that flows like a subterranean river through my life.

One of the first fruits of Morning Pages is an upsurge of creativity in many forms. Apartments get painted. Curtains get hung. Long-overdue letters get written. Art forms that we have lost or forgotten come wafting back to us with increased urgency. "Don't put me off any longer," these zephyrs beg. When we listen to them, we start to flourish.

Morning Pages galvanize our days. They prioritize them as well. Writing Morning Pages, we begin to see that each day is made up of myriad "choice points" and that we have a great deal of freedom to choose exactly how we will live. Morning Pages make us aware of which activities are dead ends for us and which activities give us a sense of health and well-being. Like a tough-love friend, Morning Pages nudge us in the direction of needed change.

"I really need more exercise," we write one day. And a second day. And a third. On the fourth day we abruptly realize that we can take a twenty-minute walk on our lunch hour. We take that walk and the next day's pages record this small triumph.

Morning Pages put us in touch with our emotions. Often those emotions have been clogged, stuffed down beneath the weight of our busy days, days filled with work, relationships and, yes, food. Too often we have touched our feelings and recoiled as from a hot stove. We have been angry and felt our anger was taboo. We have been sad and turned to some mindless television to ignore it. We have even turned to food when we felt joy. Any intense emotion can trigger a Snack Attack.

Writing Morning Pages, our mindless lives are behind us. A day at a time, a page at a time, we become mindful, acutely attuned to our personal feelings. We might write "I am angry at my sister. Talking with her bores me silly. She just gets me on the phone and does a monologue. We haven't had a real conversation in years!" Realizing how we feel, we often make spontaneous changes. To our needy sister we say, "Wait a minute—there's something I want to tell you"—and then we tell her that we are not a wailing wall and that she, too, needs to learn to listen. To our surprise, she hears us. For the first time in years, conversation is a two-way street.

The pages examine all of our relationships, not the least of which is our relationship to food. "The junk food I am eating leaves me hung over," we might write. The very next day, faced with an opportunity to binge, we decline. "What's come over you?" our friends ask as we order a salad Niçoise instead of our usual chicken potpie.

"My tastes have changed," we might joke, but more than just our tastes are changing. Jeannie began her day on Coca-Cola and moved on from there to Cheerios. "It was like a five-year-old was feeding me," she laughs. Her Morning Pages pointed out to her that she was living on sugar and starch and that a few fruits and vegetables might be in order. One day she found herself buying a container of fresh strawberries. "I've always loved fresh strawberries, but I never let myself have them. I just didn't feel deserving. A month of pages changed the habits of years. I simply couldn't bear to see how I was treating myself. Once I did see it, I knew it had to stop—and it did."

The last time I heard from Jeannie, strawberries were a staple in her diet. She had exchanged her morning Coca-Colas for tea and had even started making herself salads for lunch. She had dropped three dress sizes and lost the telltale bloat on her fine-featured face. In the photo that she sent of herself and her new boyfriend, she looked fifteen years younger than her pre-pages self.

Morning Pages sweep the house of our consciousness. They poke into every odd corner of our thoughts. They are a catcher's mitt for many small ideas that lead to larger breakthroughs. "I'd like this room better red," we think one day of the foyer to our apartment. A week later the room is red and we do, in fact, like it better. But now we think our living room could use some sprucing up. It looks so dull by comparison…

A day at a time, a room at a time, we remake our environment. Now our apartment looks like someone with self-worth lives there. And someone with self-worth is struggling to be born.

"This relationship is suffocating me," we might write. Cornered by our pages, we face the difficult fact that our marriage is arid and that we feel parched and exhausted from trying single-handedly to make it work. "I deserve reciprocity," we scrawl early one morning. Later in the day we tell the same thing to our spouse. Standing up for ourselves, we begin to walk taller. We feel the self in self-worth.

It takes courage to undertake Morning Pages, but pages themselves give us courage. In the privacy of our journal, we admit the secrets we have been harboring. Once aired, those secrets lose their power to tyrannize us. Our pen is the scalpel with which we lance the psychic infections we have been carrying. "I hate this job," we write. "It's prestigious, but there's too much stress for too little reward."

Once we target a problem area, the pages are quick to suggest solutions. We are not trapped, pages remind us. We always have choices. Sometimes those choices are difficult. We may hate our job but love our salary. Pages encourage us to take accurate stock of our situation. Perhaps, for right now, the job is worth all its aggravation. We can choose to leave or we can choose to stay. Pages help us to sort our options.

Many of us find, writing pages, that we seem to be put into contact with a source of wisdom greater than ourselves. Answers swim into consciousness that seem far wiser than our personal thinking. It is for this reason that I have come to think of Morning Pages as an effective form of meditation—especially for hyperactive Westerners. Most of us have a hard time with conventional meditation. It is very difficult for us to sit calmly and do nothing for twenty minutes. With pages, you sit calmly and do something. That something, the motion of the hand across the page, is actually a way of tracking what meditators speak of as "cloud thoughts." As our thoughts cross our consciousness, we record them on the page. Oddly, the very act of writing down our concerns helps us to put those concerns in their proper perspective. We miniaturize our...