morning writing: the power of routine

work in process//19.

I had hoped to publish this on schedule on Friday, but we went north to sleep out beside the river. Then it was Saturday, and we were rafting. Now it’s Sunday, which is actually perfect timing because Sundays before the others wake up is my favorite time to write, and this post is about the power of morning routines.

Friday morning writing. Mourning doves across the arroyo. Still cool enough to put on my Paris supermarket sweater. Mug with a fox on it. Writing into knowing.

I wrote this in my notebook Friday morning, sitting at my little table under the portal. After weeks of unsettled weather, the bright-blue mornings of almost summer have arrived. It’s writing season. 

Every season is writing season, of course, but each one brings its particular shape and rhythm. For me, late spring means getting up early with the light and going outside to write before breakfast. The air is brisk, so I move my chair to face the sun. Three pages or ten minutes in my notebook first thing, before I look at my phone or open my email, when my mind is still in the loose, dreamy space between sleeping and waking. This is my morning routine. 

Hum of a leaf-blower across the way.

The spring I was pregnant with Pippa, I read The Artist’s Way, a well-known writing guide by the author Julia Cameron. At the core of the practice is what Cameron calls Morning Pages, starting each day by writing three pages in your journal, on any subject, before your critical mind starts nagging you to be better, do better, do more. This is not unlike my friend Natalie Goldberg’s wonderful writing practice. There are only three rules, Natalie tells her students, keep your hand moving, don’t go back and edit, and you’re free to write the worst junk in the world. 

I did my morning pages religiously that spring. The house was still and almost soundless, but of course I didn’t appreciate it then. I couldn’t possibly know how much was about to change. Two years later, a few weeks after Maisy was born, I would meet Natalie and we’d become friends and she would share her writing practice with me. But I look back on those early morning pages as the start of my creative freedom, when I shifted from thinking as an editor to becoming a writer.

Rio Chama writing

Though I don’t think of them as morning pages anymore, the routine stuck. Writing in my notebook is how I notice what’s around me, ease into my day’s work, and ask—and keep asking—the age-old koan that never gets old: What is this? And remember that it’s OK—good, even—not to know. 

Some mornings I have nothing to say and don’t know where to start. This is totally normal. We are not here to write a masterpiece, we are here to wake up and start our day. Routines give us a structure we can lean on when we’re tired or uninspired or feeling a little lost. “What do you do when you’re stuck in writing?” a podcast interviewer asked me the other day. I held up my notebook in front of my screen. “I start where I am.”

Yesterday, Saturday morning, in our tent beside the Rio Chama: 

Morning on the Chama. Overcast high drifting clouds. Taste of smoke in the air from the Indios fire to the southwest, in the Chama Wilderness. Steve brought me coffee in the tent. 

My favorite writer, Alice Munro, who died on May 13, kept notebooks (excerpted here in The Paris Review), where she ironed out kinks in a story's structure and puzzled through shape. Notebooks as laboratory, form for the formless. 

In her story, “Dulce,” a character is flattened by a breakup, and leans on her small daily tasks as a kind of comfort. “She made efforts, one after the other. She set little blocks on top of one another and she had a day. Sometimes she almost could not do this. At other times the very deliberateness, the seeming arbitrariness, of what she was doing, the way she was living, exhilarated her.”

Our routines create a predictable, reliable container. We learn to trust the structure. Showing up regularly and without expectation frees us to go a little wild inside our minds. The only rule is to let it rip. You may be surprised to see where you end up. I hope you are.

morning writing

Morning writing is one of the little blocks we can stack up to make a day. Try it this week and see what happens. Before you pick up your phone, check email, or scroll through social media, and sit down with your notebook. You can write anywhere, everywhere. Start where you are. 

Memorial Day Sunday. So familiar I could almost wee.p I know this day in my muscle memory and mind, a morning like this one when I lived in this house alone, had bought it only three weeks earlier. Had a new puppy. Was terrified, exhilarated. All the time and space was my own, the garden in shambles but lovely. Soon it would be lovelier. I would meet Steve at the end of the summer. I would have one season here alone to make it mine, to sit at this table and write. 

remember, you are the flashings, xo

katie

PS if you’d like to explore morning writing practice with me, join us for Mountain Flow Camp at High Camp Hut, in Colorado, Sept 5-8. Spaces are still available, $2600 per person all inclusive. This is a weekend of pure magic!

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THIS WEEK on the Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World book tour!

Saturday June 1, 4 pm Brief Flashings pop-up book talk and signing at Salto Cafe, Nederland Colorado.

Sunday June 2, 3:30-4:30 pm. A conversation on risk, adventure and mental health with acclaimed mountaineer Cory Richards. Outside Festival, Denver Colorado.

Wednesday June 5, 7 pm, Book talk and live podcast party, hosted by Another Mother Runner at Potland Running Co, Portland OR.

And stay tuned for updates and news about my Vermont bike-packing book tour, June 23-June 28! If your bookstore, book club, run shop or running club would like to host a stop on my Brief Flashings tour, please reach out!