Morning pages
Julia Cameron's ritual: three handwritten stream-of-consciousness pages every morning, before anything else.
Morning pages are the central ritual of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way (1992): every morning, upon waking, write three handwritten stream-of-consciousness pages — whatever passes through, complaints, lists, anxieties, ideas — without rereading or showing them. It isn't literature and isn't meant to be: it's a drain.
The function is double: purging the mental noise that would parasitize the "serious" writing session, and maintaining the daily gesture with zero quality stakes — three pages where failure is impossible. Many writers use them as an airlock into the real work; others find in them, weeks later, the ideas they thought they didn't have.
Example
6:45 am, coffee, notebook: three pages of everything and nothing — and at 7:15 the novel starts lighter.