The Artist’s Way, Still Relevant After All These Years

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is the best path I have found for learning to create more freely. Essentially, how to unblock your creativity and keep it clear. There are highly effective tools that will help you recover your creativity from a variety of blocks including limiting beliefs, fear, self-sabotage, jealousy, guilt, addictions and other inhibiting forces. Replacing such negative blocks with artistic confidence and productivity.

I’ve followed The Artist’s Way about 3-4 times over my writing career, both before and after I sold. I’ve also done about the same number of workshops on the material.

The Artist’s Way, A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron
The first time I worked through The Artist’s Way, a “Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self,” as the book called itself, about one week in a month over a period of approximately three years. This is a twelve week course. So, I didn’t think I’d been that diligent. Then I hauled out my book.

It’s lower right corners are ratty, some pages have suspicious brown (tea/chocolate) and red (papercut blood/spaghetti) stains. The thing is highlighted in pink, orange, yellow, green and purple (I don’t know where my blue was). There are Robin-made tabs for such pages as: Basic Principals, Rules Of The Road, Creative Affirmation, An Artist’s Prayer, and my personal favorite, Dealing With Criticism. Scribbled notes and the occasional terrible drawing (requested by chapter “tasks”), sprawl all over the pages with asterisks and arrows and brackets.

I looked at the book, and just the state it was in showed that I had worked through the course and it had made a difference. Most importantly, at the beginning of the course, I was writing books I enjoyed and thought I could market. In the end, I had found my true voice and was writing books of my heart.

Elements of The Artist’s Way: Morning Pages
I hated the idea of morning pages, writing three full 8 ½ x 11 pages every day, freewriting, scribbling words, any words, across the paper and keeping the pen moving. IN THE MORNING. Three pages, because Cameron believes that whatever is really on your mind won’t dribble out until after 1 ½ and it takes another 1 ½ to deal with it. True for me, in the beginning, later I got so I spilled my guts from line one. Nobody reads your morning pages, not even you, until week 9.

I don’t do any scheduled task (except feed cats, which is simple self-defense) in the morning. So, they became evening pages or lunch pages for me the first time around. When I became a full time writer, they became true Morning Pages. And they worked. They cleaned out my brain of all my petty (or huge) concerns of the day so I could write. They cut down on my whining to friends. They observed the seasons. True, sometimes in my pages I filled up three lines with: “Love, love, love….” But that’s not so bad either, is it?

Since I dreaded doing the pages so much, as I went along, I marked the other reasons Cameron gave for consistent daily pages (paraphrases and direct quotes):

1. Morning pages help us stop taking our negative Censor (Inner Critic) as the voice of reason and learn to hear it for the blocking device that it is.
2.  Morning pages get us to the other side of our fear, negativity, moods.
3.  Other writing seems to suddenly be far more free and expansive and easier.
4. Processes extreme emotions and leads to clarity (sometimes painful).
5. We identify ourselves. We learn what we want and ultimately become willing to make the changes needed to get it.
6. Points the way to reality: this is how you’re feeling; what do you make of that?
7. Loosens our hold on fixed opinions and short-sighted views. We see that our moods, views, and insights are transitory. We acquire a sense of movement, a current of change in our lives.
8. We treat ourselves more gently. Feeling less desperate, we are less harsh with ourselves and with others.
9. Morning pages end dry spells, doing the pages means we have not collapsed to the floor of our despair and refused to move on. We have doubted, yes, but we have moved on.
10. Morning pages are meditation, a practice that brings us to our creativity and our Creator.

Artist’s Date: The artist’s date can be summed up in one word: Play. Or two: Pamper Yourself. Your artist is a creative child, so spend an hour once a week to fulfill it: roll down a hill, take a train ride, dance, swing, color in a book or arrange stickers, doodle. And do it BY YOURSELF.

I must admit, this was the portion of the course that I followed the least. When I started the Artist’s Way I lived by myself and was used to pleasing myself. The date became more important when I had a roommate, but I rarely formalized it. On the other hand, now that I think about it, I currently have this daily journal…and developed a passion for stickers…and I’ve bought 4 sets of those new metallic ink pens (the ink is archive quality, but one set was a gift for my 5 year old niece)….

Tasks: Chapter exercises. These are what hooked me. One in the first chapter blew my mind open. I wrote one of the creative affirmations: “I am allowed to nurture my artist,” 10 times. Sure enough, my Censor popped up while doing this: “You have so many other things to do. Your house isn’t clean, your bills aren’t paid. You aren’t a responsible person.” I listened and analyzed. Where did this come from? And found out that Censor sounded like my parents (particularly my father) and the basic idea that the critic was getting across to me, and which I truly believed, was: “You can’t do what you want to do; you must do what we want you to do.” With a corollary: “What you want to do is foolish and stupid and a waste of time and will never amount to anything. What others want you to do is always more important.” Wow! Hooked. Try it for yourself.

Warning: Week 4, Reading Deprivation: No READING, no TV, movies, radio. This is horrible, but it works, too. It was several years ago (the week Jon Benet Ramsey was killed, and I never caught up), and was one of the most intensely creative times of my life. I was also more observant of the people and little dramas around me. The pressure to tell myself stories forced me to write and write and write. I still remember how incredible it felt — like a dam breaking open and all this writing pouring out of me in a rush. Very heady.

Still, I only lasted 5 days, and congratulated myself that I made it that long. I got desperate. on the evening bus, I found myself looking over the shoulder of my seatmate who was reading an article called “The Guide to Effective Deworming.” (This is a true story.) She must have been a vet student or something, and heroine material (I was supposed to be observant on the bus, Chapter 4 said so). Youngish — mid-twenties — red-brown hair, but not as dark as chestnut; creamy complexion with a sprinkling of freckles; small, straight nose. Very nice. Much more interesting than the pictures of horses with strange tubelike objects in their mouths. Ok, so I maybe glanced at the article. I didn’t read it. I just looked at the pictures. After all, anyone would be interested in — ah — forget it. Anyway, my seatmate finished reading that particularly fascinating article and flipped onto the next. Did I mention that these were photocopied sheets, not a real magazine, and the print and photos were slightly fuzzy?

The next article. From “In the Barn.” “Mounting Blocks.” Temptation. Really. I was writing historical romance. I’ve even written about mounting blocks. I need to research them. Words jumped out at me: “old tree stump, overturned bucket,” “new portable mounting blocks for easy transportation”. There were pictures, too, but not as interesting as horses. My heroine wasn’t riveted by the article. She scanned it and went to the next. “Metabolic Disease, Test Treatments.” No pictures. I sighed with relief. I was saved.

I wanted to talk about keeping compliments, making an image of your Censor, doing a collage, or listing secret passions, but this article is now overlong. But it was fascinating to read some of the quotes in The Artist’s Way, and look at the highlighted wisdom and my own words. Maybe it’s time to start up again….