This is a fun game I came up with about six years ago when teaching Animation and Game Design students and I’ve since introduced many other people from different fields to the idea.

Take a stack of paper and draw or print six empty comic book style frames on each one. If comics aren’t your thing think of them as storyboards for a film.

Every morning fill in three of these Comics with an idea. Don’t worry about whether the idea is any good or not just fill the boxes with stuff. Drawings, text, scribbles, notes, dreams, thoughts. Don’t worry bout the six frames making a narrative sense.

Don’t look at the comics again. This is important. The idea is to just practice getting stuff down every morning. If you go back to the comics looking for ideas you will begin to judge them. This is partly a way of practicing being able to withhold your critical judgment. Of course you may, very occasionally, come up with something that sticks with you (the image in this post is of my Monkey Shouting Comic, the genesis of a routine I now perform regularly) but don’t go mining the old comics for good stuff, leave it.

You may recognize Morning Comics as a variation of Morning Pages described in The Artists’ Way, by Julia Cameron. The idea here is to wake up and immediately write three pages about anything, simply transcribing your thoughts.

I initially thought that switching to Comics would make the exercise more useful for both visual thinkers and those with dyslexia (Design courses have the second highest percentage of students with dyslexia in the UK, after Agricultural Studies). I actually found that comics work better for pretty much everyone, even writers. Simply introducing images as well as words opens up the possibilities. And I think the six frames help to weaken the tyranny of the blank page a little.

As far as I can tell the idea of an exercise in writing without judging actually goes back to 1934 and Dorothea Brande’s excellent Becoming A Writer. Brande discusses the Two Sides of a Writer, the side that writes uncritically and fluidly and the side that later edits, prunes, and fashions the raw writing into the finished pages that are fit for the world to see.

If you try Morning Comics be sure to read the wonderful 99 Ways To Tell A Story.