The Martian Chronicles of Morning Pages

There is something magical about the morning hour, when the coffee is still hot and the world hasn’t yet demanded your attention. It’s in this quiet space—between dream and waking, between possibility and responsibility—that the rockets of imagination first fire their engines.

I think of the typewriter as a spacecraft. Each morning, I sit before it like a pilot preparing for launch, fingers poised over keys that might as well be navigation controls. Where will we go today? Mars? The carnival midway of October? Perhaps to that small Illinois town where autumn leaves whisper secrets to anyone willing to listen.

The morning pages—those three longhand pages that Julia Cameron gifted to the world—are not unlike the daily chronicles of a space explorer. Each entry is a transmission from the frontier of consciousness, a message sent back to Mission Control (which is, of course, your waking self) about what you’ve discovered in the territory of first thoughts.

You see, creativity is not a lightning strike. It’s not the sudden flash that illuminates the darkness. No, creativity is more like the gentle Martian dawn I once imagined, where two moons hang in a butterscotch sky and the ancient canals catch the first light. It comes slowly, consistently, with the patience of geological time.

The magic happens in the ritual itself. The same chair, the same hour, the same expectation that something—anything—will emerge from the blankness. It’s like the way the dandelion wine fermented in Douglas Spaulding’s grandfather’s basement, becoming something extraordinary through nothing more than time and gentle attention.

I’ve watched writers torture themselves, waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect idea, the perfect conditions. But creativity doesn’t require perfect conditions any more than rockets require perfect weather. Sometimes you launch into the storm. Sometimes you write badly, but you write. Sometimes the morning pages are filled with complaints about the neighbor’s dog or worries about the electric bill. But even these mundane transmissions are mapping the territory of your mind.

The kitchen table becomes Cape Canaveral. The notebook becomes the ship’s log. The pen becomes the instrument that records not just what you’re thinking, but what you’re becoming. Because that’s the secret the morning pages understand: you don’t write to become a writer. You write to become more fully yourself.

There’s a reason I always wrote in the morning. The rational mind—that stern taskmaster who insists on logical plots and sensible characters—hasn’t fully awakened yet. In the dawn hours, the subconscious still has the wheel. The child who believed in time machines and loved the carnival is still in charge of the ship.

This is when the impossible becomes possible. When you might find yourself writing about a woman who loves a man so much she ages backward, or a planet where rain falls for seven years straight, or a library where books burn themselves rather than be destroyed. These ideas don’t come from the thinking mind. They come from the part of you that still believes in magic.

The morning pages are your private Mars mission. Three pages, every day, no matter what. No editing, no judgment, no concern for whether anyone else would understand. Just the pure act of exploration, the daily commitment to discovering what’s out there in the vast landscape of your own imagination.

And here’s what I’ve learned after decades of these daily launches: consistency creates its own magic. The ritual becomes a signal to your unconscious that you’re ready to receive. It’s like the way the old radio programs used to begin—same time, same station, same call sign—until your whole being learned to tune in to that frequency.

The Martian dawn comes not because you force it, but because you’re there, waiting, ready, every morning at the same coordinates. The butterscotch sky, the twin moons, the ancient canals—they’re all there, waiting for you at your kitchen table, if you’ll only show up and begin to write.

Gemini. AI resurrects Ray Bradbury. Apologies to those who might feel that this is a betrayal of  Ray Bradbury legacy.