Writing Help And Morning Pages

Reading Julia Cameron’s The Sound of Paper is like revisiting an old friend. For more than fifteen years, her morning pages ( three uncensored pages written every morning fresh out of bed) have been my daily writing help, the friend that coaxed me out of fear and inertia about putting words on paper and like the Nike slogan, urged me to Just Do It!

Why is it so difficult to write? Writing is an activity removed from direct experience. Writers have often mourned the loss of words to describe an event and this is probably because rendering what happened in words involves a completely different set of neural motor skills. Freud in Civilization and Its Discontent sees writing as technology; both he claims act as prosthetics to the body, functioning as an appendage or addition. Even the word prosthetics is ambivalent, carrying both the negative connotation of loss or compensation and the positive sense of extension. After all, writing is a later development of the human brain and signals not only the beginning of recorded history but also the evolution of the highly specialized and compartmentalized intelligence in the prefrontal cortex.

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