Ten years of morning pages — three sides, longhand, before anything else — and I have read back perhaps two per cent of them.
What it is actually for
Not a record. I thought it was a record for the first three years, and wrote accordingly: what happened, who said what, a kind of dull minute-taking of my own life. Those years are the ones I never reread, because there is nothing in them.
What it is for is getting the top layer off. The first side is always the same complaints in a slightly different order. The second side is where something I did not know I thought turns up.
The first page is the toll you pay to get to the second one.
What I find when I do go back
Almost never what I expect. Never the big events — those are documented everywhere else. What survives rereading is the small specific stuff: a sentence somebody said on a train, the exact weather on a day that mattered, a worry that turned out to be nothing, recorded at full volume.
The three rules I keep
- Longhand. Typing is fast enough to stay on the top layer.
- No rereading for a year. Anything sooner and I start writing for the reader.
- Nobody else, ever. The moment it could be read, it becomes a different document.
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