Morning Pages: The Almost True Story of My Life

Joe is the master of the personal essay. In a handful of pages, he tells a small tale and ends each with an epiphany.You can buy this book to see someone work through a case of writer's block. But I would highly recommend it if you want to read some small masterpieces which happen to have been written at the rate of three pages a day.

Morning Pages is about a longtime writer with writer's block. It's a great tie-in with Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way and with the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Saroyan. Cameron says to write three pages as fast as you can each morning upon rising for twelve weeks to silence the internal censor, thereby melting the writer's block. Garcia Marquez writes five pages daily, even stopping mid-sentence at the end of the fifth page. Ben Halaby, the protagonist, writes about his block as he is writing a book. The evolution of a novel is a protagonist as well~~Halaby doesn't even realize he's writing one! It is fascinating and deeply moving in that Halaby's whole life seeps onto the page. You get a sense of a man's view of the world growing up in America in the second half of the 20th Century. Reading Morning Pages was like eating my favorite dessert. I couldn't eat it fast enough and was afraid of finishing it.