Julia Cameron, best known for her book The Artist’s Way, recommends morning pages as the bedrock tool of creative recovery—three pages of longhand, stream-of-conscious writing done first thing in the morning. 

That’s why, at Project Write Now, we host a Morning Pages gathering every weekday on Zoom. But let me be clear, when I say “we,” I don’t mean me. Mornings are not my strong suit.

I also struggle with such rigid structure. While I love the idea of writing consistently, the constraint of three pages every day bothers me. Some days, I can do three pages and then more pages will just keep coming and I’ll find myself on a writing roll. Other days, though, three pages have felt like 300 and I’ve struggled to get just one word out from under the blinking cursor.

I know the point of morning pages is to break through that writer’s block, but every writer’s process is different, and for me, sometimes I find this exercise builds up my walls rather than breaks them down.

I have a lofty goal of finishing a novel, which requires serious commitment. So, how could I make this idea of morning pages more reasonable for my personal process? 

On March 7, 2016, I took a notebook, wrote on the cover, “One Sentence a Day,” and on the first page I wrote just one sentence. The sentence was: “I can climb inside myself; the problem is, I can only go alone.” Who knew how telling that sentence would be as I continued to climb into the pages, one sentence, one day at a time?

Tomorrow marks nine years of commitment since I began this endeavor. That equals three full notebooks and most of a fourth, so far. It’s not always done in the morning and it doesn’t always lead to more sentences. But it does require me to write every single day. And it has given me a routine that feels like it fits with my style. 

My style is to write poetry. Short, choppy sentences. This lends itself nicely to bite-size daily projects. And remember that novel I’d mentioned? After struggling with it for some years, I finally decided to rewrite it in verse. Short, choppy sentences, just like my One Sentence a Day project. And some of my novel sentences have been lifted right from those one sentence notebooks. 

The more days that pass, the more sentences I’ve written, both in my One Sentence a Day Project and in my novel. Each project feeds the other. When one sentence makes me want to write another and another, I move them to my novel in progress. When just one sentence is enough, it stays in my one sentence notebook. Sometimes sentences cross both projects. Sometimes they don’t. But the point is that every day I am writing in a way that works for me, and this consistent writing journey has helped me become more routine with my bigger writing endeavors.

I highly recommend this idea to anyone who wants to write but struggles with rigid concepts like morning pages. Make your own One Sentence a Day notebook. Start today. It doesn’t have to be in the morning—anytime is fine. Write one sentence, and date it. Do it again tomorrow. Keep going.

Let your story tell itself, one sentence at a time.