In her acclaimed book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron recommends filling three pages with handwritten, stream-of-consciousness writing each morning as a tool to unleash your innate creativity. If you take her advice to heart, you will see your morning pages multiply quickly, leaving you to wonder what to do with this ever-expanding collection. You may have already decided that you will just recycle the paper and leave no trace of your morning ritual. However, I think it is more likely that you, like me, hold onto your writing, even when you are not sure why. Here are some ideas of things you can do with your accumulated morning pages.

First, develop a system for storing and organizing your pages. If you write them in a bound notebook or journal, your pages will already be stored in a chronological order. When you start writing each morning, make note of the day of the week or the date, to visually mark where one day’s writing ends and another’s begins. Somewhere on the notebook, write a start date when you begin using it and an end date when you fill it or decide to start using a new one. Personally, I prefer to write my pages on loose leaf paper and collect them in a ring binder, but I still store them chronologically and put the day of the week at the top of each day’s writing.

Whether or not you go further in organizing your morning pages depends on you and whether you perceive it is useful to do so. You could flag the start of each month, if you thought you might later want to pinpoint a certain time in your life more easily. Flags and color-coding can also be used to mark recurrent themes in your pages, say red for your gripes about work or yellow for your musings on your hopes and dreams. A system like this can be implemented as you go, on a daily or weekly basis, or done later, upon a rereading of your morning pages. If you choose to mark your pages for later reference, I would suggest doing it only after the writing is finished so as not to interrupt the flow of your ideas.

A more careful organizational system is only useful if you plan to return to your pages, reread them, and perhaps use them as a resource or for ongoing reflection. I am not in the habit of regularly rereading my morning pages. Nevertheless, on several occasions I have found myself looking back to a specific period of time and rereading a selection of my daily writings. Once it was because I became aware of the inner turmoil I was struggling with around a key relationship. I felt like I had been writing the same things regarding the situation over and over for a long time. When I looked back and confirmed this was indeed the case, that I was stuck in an unhealthy pattern, I was able to see what needed to change. Other times I have gone back to reread something I wrote because I saw potential in an idea that merited further development.

I am working on a memoir, so anything that chronicles my life as I am living it can become a valuable resource in my work. Morning pages became a part of my routine just over two years ago, which is not the part of my life covered in my memoir to date. I used to journal more sporadically, sort of “as needed,” and I am able to recover significant details about past events and my emotional experience of those events through rereading my old writings. Undoubtedly my growing collection of binders filled with morning pages will someday serve a similar purpose for this or another project.

Your morning pages are a chronicle of your life and now you have some ways to give them a life beyond their daily function. I invite you to read more of my Ezine articles on Writing Morning Pages.