The idea behind Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way is that by writing three pages, longhand and stream-of consciousness, first thing in the morning, you can overcome the obstacles that stop you from becoming your most creative self. This works partly because it forces you to create something (even if it is just a long list of gripes) every single day. It doesn't take much time. You're not even supposed to think. But the act itself gets you past all that self-defeating fretting about why you think you aren't a creative person. Cameron sees her morning pages as "a form of meditation," as "spiritual windshield wipers."

While Cameron touts the morning pages as a way of life, she suggests you start out doing them as part of a "twelve-week program to recover your creativity." If you would like to keep your first twelve weeks of morning pages together in one tidy place, The Artist's Way Morning Pages Journal is a fine tool for doing so. Each nearly blank page features an inspiring quotation from The Artist's Way: "Leap, and the net will appear," says one; "Creativity lies not in the done but in doing," reminds another. We should mention that many of these little inspirations include references to God, which may be troublesome even for spiritual atheists. --Jane Steinberg