Who here has gone through The Artist’s Way all the way? How about more than once?1
My AW story: I managed to avoid ever touching the book until just over a decade ago. “That kind of stuff” made me feel very exposed and vulnerable, so I practiced avoidance, with a dash of self-deprecation, just for fun: If I had any real talent I wouldn’t need artist dates or whatever, right? Obviously.
I can’t remember who convinced me, but I ended up buying it and gave it a go. Of course, I never got all the way through it. Nope. I freed myself [ran away] from this very corny [matter-of-fact and blunt] book after seven boring [terrifying] weeks. I especially dreaded the morning pages - three pages of longhand brain dumping every morning to be stuffed into a manila envelope and ignored until the full 12 weeks were up. Me! Dreading writing! I could write 20 pages in longhand per sitting, as long as it wasn’t prescribed. This is SO DUMB, I fumed. It’s been seven freakin’ weeks and nothing is changing for me. This kind of discipline is pointless for someone like me, and if I had any talent at all I’d be doing this already and clearly there is something wrong with me because everyone loves this book and all I’m writing is C R A P.
I decided it was time to right the ship. How? By looking at at more Instagram and Twitter, unable to understand why I was so angry and FOMOing all the time. Meanwhile, The Artist’s Way minded its business on the shelf, patiently waiting for me to get over myself. Thankfully, it always made the cut when it was time to weed books.
Anyway! Here we are in 2024, and I’m back on the AW train as of a few days ago. Things are… different.2 I appear to have overcome my dread of morning pages. I even changed up my very regular morning journal practice to give them some room.
I sat at the kitchen table on the first day, scribbling away while a cup of tea steamed nearby and my phone was banished to another room. I stuffed those pages into a brand new manila envelope and got ready to go to my day job. Then: A word I’d written without much thought during that session suddenly came back to me: Reckoning.
It pestered me while I put on some makeup, made my lunch, fed the cats. What does “reckoning” actually mean? Before I could consult my pocket computer, my internal voice was like, well, hang on a sec. What do YOU think it means? It was uncomfortable to stay with my own brain and not run away to the internet, but I eventually arrived at: Needing to make a choice or decision, reasoning, forming an opinion after considering evidence, being forced to face a truth.
It’s also the name of R.E.M.’s second record, so I went along with the universe and gave it a thorough listen, the first in maybe a year. It’s undeniably a masterpiece, a meditation, a beautiful record that’s distinctly from a specific time and place. But it sounded and felt, on that sunny fall day 40+ years after its release, more modern than ever.
Later, I wrote in my journal:
As I put Reckoning on in the car, I thought about how this train of thought was not ‘fed’ to me, I was not ‘served’; it came to me immediately after I’d been writing. I was my own influencer.
It was easily the best morning I’ve had in my brain for a while.
I wrote the above a month ago. I’m still with AW, though as I navigate the usual 8-5/M-F, fret about the absurd state of the world, ruthlessly weed my personal library (AW continues to make the cut), and work with Jim bring my studio buildout project to completion3, I’m doing it my way. My artist dates have been walks outside or painting drywall4 . Morning pages still rule.
LOTSA (Lisa’s Open Tabs, Saved Aggressively)
KCRW’s Lost Notes: Groupies podcast is an absolute banger in every way and not to be missed
Stella Marrs is still making postcards
I currently make my French press coffee this way - fussy but worth it
My friend and former across-the-street neighbor Annie F. Adams is doing a democracy by running for local office
Pulled one of these from a giveaway pile & I think it’s going to make it
For those unfamiliar: The Artist’s Way is a book by writer Julia Cameron, published in 1992, that takes doubters of their own innate creativity through 12 weeks of practice and artist dates and morning pages. It’s a classic of the creativity self-help/recovery genre and is discovered anew all the time. It’s also hard af.
Ten years will do that, but these last ten, and especially the last eight, and ESPECIALLY the last five, have been notably vexing.
Next update: Nothin’ but studio.
"The biggest wagon is the empty wagon is the noisiest..."
Omg. I, too, am moved to action by your post. Been curious about AW for a few years now, have idly looked for it when I’m in a used bookstore. After reading what you had to say, it seems It’s Time — just ordered a copy.