The shelves are chock full of beautiful craft books — wisdom and practices from accomplished writers and generous teachers.

The trick is learning how to walk the line between good advice (sometimes contradictory advice) and affinity — the advice that actually belongs to you.

When reading any how-to, carry a small pouch of salt. Chew a grain as you swallow the instruction. Let discernment dissolve slowly. And keep that salt nearby when resistance rises. Sometimes resistance is fear. Sometimes it’s intuition.

This is the fine line we walk in many parts of life, but especially as writers.

A couple of weeks ago, I was bemoaning the fact that I’d once again written my “morning pages” late in the day.

“Why don’t you stop calling them morning pages?” my partner asked. “Why can’t they just be daily pages?”

Radical.

I’ve been faithfully writing my pages — mostly, but not always, in the morning — since early 2020. I’ve taken liberties with The Artist’s Way over the years, but renaming the practice felt like tampering with scripture.

“But they’re morning pages,” I said. “From The Artist’s Way.”

“So?”

He wasn’t wrong.

My Daily Pages

Julia Cameron, Anne Lamott, Natalie Goldberg, Steven Pressfield, Elizabeth Gilbert — these writers and many more have generously shared practices that serve them. Their structures are scaffolding, not cages.

Advice is an offering, not a commandment.

It’s wise to consider what works for others. It’s wiser still to bring that advice into conversation with your inner artist — the quieter authority who knows your rhythms, your seasons, your capacity.

Make the practice your own. Rename it. Rearrange it. Expand it. Let it evolve.

So this year, I’m still writing pages rooted in Cameron’s model. But I call them Daily Pages. They’re braided with other rituals that steady me: short daily readings, copying passages from them with my non-dominant hand, a fourth page of gratitude and affirmation.

The structure remains.
The spirit remains.
The ownership deepens.

Where have you taken good advice and shaped it to fit your own hands?

©Pennie Nichols. All Rights Reserved. 2026