Don’t Write Alone | Toolkit

‘The Artist’s Way’ is Better Than My Way

Is my singular definition of myself as a novelist useful to me?

Many years ago, I picked up a copy of The Artist’s Way and thought, Amateur hour. My rude viewpoint was inspired by a young woman I hazily knew who’d read the book and realized that what she was meant to do with her life was quit her nine-to-five job and sell items she made from yarn. She told me this with great excitement. Actually, standing next to her was like standing next to a rocket that had just been lit and was about to shoot into outer space. She seemed to be glowing too much, and the glint in her eyes made me wary. Is there anything more suspicious than a person who is intensely happy?

Obviously, it was wrong to judge a book by a single one of its readers, and it was also wrong to judge the reader. Why did I assume Rocket Woman was an amateur? I never saw her yarn items. Maybe they were exceptional.

After revisiting my specific and totally unfounded resentment against The Artist’s Way in the bowels of The Strand (because where better to put the down-and-out devotees of the self-help section than a basement?), I rolled my eyes and bought it along with a bunch of other books. Sometimes I’d notice it on my shelf, think, Amateur yarn, and then I’d go back to ignoring it. Years passed. Then more years. Then a friend I respect told me in a non-rocket-like way—this friend is the opposite of a rocket; she’s always statue-calm—that she was reading it and that I should too.

So I finally did.

The Artist’s Way is a twelve-week program. What I’m going to do now is tell you about my week-by-week experience of going through it.

Here are a few things to know before we begin:

The full title of the book by Julia Cameron is The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Julia’s belief is that creativity is a spiritual practice. She talks about God, but in a 12-step way rather than a religious way. In case you don’t know this, a 12-step conception of God is basically any entity you want it to be. I know this because I, like Julia, am sober.

If you have problems with God and/or with Julia’s tone, which I would classify as very earnest (she’s funny sometimes, but I’m not sure it’s intentional), you sort of have to pretend that you don’t in order to get anything out of The Artist’s Way. I recently heard someone say that the most useful way to engage with self-help books is to keep this question in the back of your mind: “What if they’re right?” Or, in other words, what if you’re wrong? What if your way isn’t the best way?

At the start of the book, Julia lays out some Basic Principles, which are essentially her understanding of creativity in list form. It’s an all-inclusive understanding: Creativity doesn’t only belong to people who write “Artist” (or some approximation thereof) on their W-9s. It belongs to all of us. We are all creative, and in harnessing our creativity we move closer to our true nature. To not be creative, then, is to move farther away from who we really are. The goal of the book is not to discover, but rather to recover the creative self that has possibly gotten buried along the way.

Julia’s Basic Tools are: (1) Morning Pages (“three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness”), and (2) Artist Dates, which consist of taking yourself out into the world to be inspired—by a museum, a movie, a walk in nature, a trip to the stationery store to buy some stickers, etcetera. If it’s an activity that feeds your inner artist, then it’s an Artist Date. For the duration of the twelve-week program, Julia suggests Morning Pages every day and taking yourself on one Artist Date per week.

Part of what makes this book genius—and cultish—is its coining of terms. It’s not, “Write your thoughts down.” It’s Morning Pages. It’s not, “Be inspired by the world.” It’s Artist Dates. Does Julia overdo it with the coining of terms? Yes. But the ones that stick really stick, so I think we can forgive her.

Before you begin the book, Julia suggests that you sign—and this is an example of her over-coining—a Creativity Contract with yourself promising to finish. I did not literally do this, but in my head, I did.

Week One: Recovering a Sense of Safety

“Remember,” Julia writes, “your artist is a child.”

In this chapter, we are asked to remember all the shitty things people said to us in childhood that damaged our creative self-worth. (I recalled someone telling me during my reckless teenage years, “You’re going to flip burgers for the rest of your life.”) We’re also asked to list statements that championed our early artistic efforts. (Mr. Higa, in fourth grade, told me, “You’re a good writer.”)

Julia lists some possible core negative beliefs that might be holding us back. My favorite is number ten, which I think might be a good illustration of Julia’s unintentional humor: “I will be struck straight (if gay).”

After addressing personal negative beliefs, Julia lists the negative beliefs we might have about artists in general. “Artists are drunk, crazy, broke . . .” This really struck a chord with me, even though I didn’t want it to. From age nineteen to age twenty-seven, a period during which I got an undergrad degree in creative writing and then took a bunch creative writing classes in Boston, I would say, “I’m going to be a journalist” when asked what I wanted to do with my life, and the real reason I did that is precisely because I was scared of being a drunk crazy broke novelist. Journalists, I thought, were stable. They had offices to go to and truths to report, whereas novelists were flimsy, aimless people.

Before reading this chapter, I had understood my creative past to be intact. It actually took me a while to remember that person who’d told me I was going to flip burgers for the rest of my life, and the only reason I did is because my friend, the one who suggested I read the book, said, “Are you sure there’s nothing?”

After reading this chapter, I came to a new understanding: No creative past is intact, because no childhood is intact. Even though I haven’t been consciously aware of it, some mean little voice has been whispering “burger flipper” at me all these years.

Thankfully, after taking a bath in the negative, Julia offers up some positive affirmations, and then she gives us our first tasks. I’ll mention only one here, because it’s the one that speaks to the largest way in which this book influenced my understanding of myself. Julia calls this one Imaginary Lives: “If you had five other lives to lead, what would you do in each of them?”

What I wrote in the margin: “Painter, sculptor, architect, pianist, singer.”

How I felt after writing that: Like my life could be many lives.

The question this posed: Is my singular definition of myself as a novelist useful to me?

Before reading this chapter, I had understood my creative past to be intact.

Week Two: Recovering a Sense of Identity

In this chapter, Julia cautions us against spending time with “poisonous playmates” and “crazymakers.” Where is our time going? Where is our attention? How can we recover a sense of identity if our daily lives are spent on people and endeavors that zap our energy?

These questions forced me to take a hard look at who I spend my time with and why. As per Julia’s suggestion, I drew a circle. Outside the circle, I wrote down the things and people I need protection from. (“My phone.”) Inside the circle, I wrote down the names of non-draining people in my life and the things I need to protect. (“Novel, play.”)

The reason I wrote “play” is because of Julia. By week two, I’d begun to understand that devoting time to having fun, a.k.a. going on Artist Dates, actually makes me more productive at the desk. On the one hand, this seems counterintuitive. On the other hand, it does not. If you’re working all the time, then you’re probably less happy and your life is out of balance. If your life is infused with some fun, then you’re happier and your life is more balanced and your work time has a bounciness to it.

The word bounciness offers the perfect segue to tell you what I did with my play time: I played with a ball. In a pool. Like I was five years old. And it was awesome.

The second (and more profound) circular task that Julia offers up in week two is called Life Pie: “Draw a circle. Divide it into six pieces of pie. Label one piece spirituality, another exercise, another play, and so on with work, friends, and romance/adventure. Place a dot in each slice at the degree to which you are fulfilled in that area. Connect the dots. This will show you where you are lopsided.”

Looking at my lopsided Life Pie, I thought, Oh. Just as I have singularly defined myself as a novelist, I have singularly devoted myself to work and exercise at the expense of all the other aspects of existence.

And then I thought: Is this my real life? Because it looks like a bummer.

Another one of the tasks in week two is to add five more professions to the Imaginary Lives list. I wrote: “Director, gallerist, card shop owner, yoga teacher, dancer,” and next to that: “OMG I should take a dance class!”

I did take a dance class that week. It was my Artist Date. Watching my limbs splash around erroneously in a dimly lit studio in Highland Park, I came to the conclusion that no, I am not a dancer, not even remotely. I found this to be a relief. Yes, my life could be many lives, but, you know, within reason.

Week Three: Recovering a Sense of Power

Julia on synchronicity: “Answered prayers are scary.” In this section, Julia reveals that no, she doesn’t believe in luck or coincidence. She believes that God brings us opportunities and we either see them or we don’t.

My initial reaction to the term synchronicity: Oh god. (But not like Oh-greater-force-god. Like eye-roll-Oh-god.)

What ended up happening: In week three and the weeks that followed, I saw synchronicity everywhere. I was thinking about a friend and then she called me. I hired a publicist even though I couldn’t really afford it, and then I got a letter telling me that my dead dad had left me more money than I’d thought. At almost the exact moment that I realized I needed a new dresser, my neighbor offered me one, and it was beautiful, with walnut paneling on the inside of the drawers.

How do we prescribe meaning to the events of our lives? This is really important. Actually, it’s kind of everything. To be honest, I can’t fully wrap my head around the divinity angle, but I try to believe in it anyway, because I just think it’s a more powerful way to live.

Week Four: Recovering a Sense of Integrity

Best line: “‘I don’t need this anymore,’ we say as we toss a low-self-worth shirt into the giveaway pile.”

As our identities shift, Julia tells us in week four, so do our personal tastes—and that might mean that we need to clear out our low-self-worth stuff. Getting rid of stuff is one of my favorite activities, so this wasn’t a new adventure for me, but labeling the rejected items as “low-self-worth” was an epiphany. Before Julia, my perception of the items I rejected was, “I dislike you.” After Julia, it was, “I dislike you and you’re holding me back.” I guess we could say that Julia’s advice is the inverse of Marie Kondo’s: Keep only what sparks joy. In my opinion, Julia’s negative framing is a more helpful way to consider discards, because it elicits a visceral reaction. Get away from me! While I appreciate Marie Kondo, “spark joy” makes me feel like I should be hugging the sun in a laundry commercial or something.

Why did I have so much extra time to make giveaway piles of my low-self-worth stuff in week four? Because—crafty timing, Julia—it was Reading Deprivation Week.

“With no novel to sink into (and no television to numb us out),” Julia writes, “an evening becomes a vast savannah in which furniture—and other assumptions—get rearranged.”

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the use of the word assumptions in that sentence.

Yeah.

In 1992, reading deprivation meant avoiding, obviously, the written word, and also TV. In modern terms, I interpreted this to include social media, email, and texting. Of course, I wasn’t a perfect abstainer, but I did make a strong attempt to text and email as little as possible. It was very inconvenient, and because the more inconvenient a thing is the more you get out of it, I got a lot out of this exercise. I felt a new sense of peace—intermingled with a nasty reckoning about the amount of time I spend being (this is kind of a Dad Joke, sorry in advance) an escape artist.

How do we prescribe meaning to the events of our lives?

Week Five: Recovering a Sense of Possibility

A quote I highlighted in this chapter:

“Expect your every need to be met, expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level, expect to grow spiritually.” (Eileen Caddy)

In week five, we get into scarcity, which is a popular fixation. Do you think that your good luck is about to end? Do you think that your bad luck will go on forever?

Me too.

The antidote to scarcity thinking is, of course, a greater reliance on God, but that doesn’t mean you can just sit back and loaf and expect magic. You have to work too. Or, as Julia puts it: “Pray to catch the bus, then run as fast as you can.”

The assumption that the world doesn’t have enough for us: This is usually what we’re talking about when we talk about scarcity. In this chapter, Julia specifies scarcity thinking as it relates to the process of making art. “We are stingy with ourselves,” she writes. Sometimes, we set aside our art to be good mothers or good friends or good whatevers, and while this may look good from afar, it’s actually not. According to Julia, it’s called the Virtue Trap. In this trap, procrastination is confused for martyrdom. We could also go further and say that the procrastination is self-sabotage, which of course it is.

What Julia suggests we do in the tasks for week five is get granular about how we’re self-sabotaging. What are the ways in which we’re mean to ourselves? I answered as follows: “When I’m not 110 percent, I guess I feel like I’m on the brink of becoming a burger flipper.”

Week Six: Recovering a Sense of Abundance

“Listening to the siren song of more, we are deaf to the still small voice waiting in our soul to whisper, ‘You’re enough.’”

Next to this, I wrote, “OMFG this sentence.”

In this chapter, Julia continues the scarcity conversation by talking about it in reverse. Abundance! Luxury! Yes, we are stingy with ourselves. And that is why, as Julia writes, “luxury is a learned practice.” Can we buy ourselves a candle? Carve out a nook in the house for our books? Take a ten-minute minibath? (Yes, minibath as one word is another coined term, and I award Julia forty points for it.)

My luxuries in week six: I bought a very expensive candle. I also spent an entire day painting a portrait of my bouncy ball. (Please see the header to this essay.)

An unexpected suggestion from Julia in this chapter is to keep a log of all your expenses. Money is energy. Where is yours going?

At least seven hundred people (self-help gurus, money experts, anyone with common sense) have told me to keep a money log.

But I never did it.

Until Julia.

What this leads me to believe: I trust Julia Cameron more than I trust other people.

Chapter Seven: Recovering a Sense of Connection

Miles Davis said, “Don’t fear mistakes. There are none.”

I mean, how nice would it feel to really internalize that?

In this chapter, Julia invites us to think about the things we’d do if we didn’t have to do them perfectly. She lists a bunch of options. My favorite? Flying a trapeze.

More interesting: Julia’s Jealousy Map, an exercise in which we are asked to write down all the people we’re jealous of (column one) and explain why (column two). I wrote down the names of people who are shinier than me. Column three is called Action Antidote. Translation: What are you going to do about it? Next to every name, I wrote, “Keep working.” This is how jealousy becomes a map. It shows you what direction to take.

Side note: Green is the color of jealousy and also of hope. (I didn’t know this.)

My favorite Task this week: Listen to music and doodle. (Julia recommends listening to one side of an album. This is one of the many cute relics from the nineties that appears in the book.)

Returning to the question I posed in week one—Is my singular definition of myself as a novelist useful to me?—I knew before starting the book that the answer was no. What this exercise and Julia in general encouraged me to do was double down on my no. No, I don’t have to only write novels, and no, I don’t have to feel bad about spending my time making technically imperfect doodles. Since I have zero training as a visual artist, I’m not supposed to be good at it. My doodles are supposed to be imperfect. Making things with no expectations attached? Offers the same freedom that I imagine trapeze flyers must feel.

Week Eight: Recovering a Sense of Strength

This chapter is about how to survive the artistic journey. Because there will be setbacks. In week eight, I was prompted to recall all the many setbacks I’ve had in my career so far, such as all those novels I wrote that are still on my computer and nowhere else.

Julia’s consideration of the full arc of the artist’s life—or of the full mountain range of peaks and valleys—was helpful to read about. I felt like, Oh, that’s right, things will keep changing. It reminded me of a thing my friend Liz says sometimes: “It’s about the long game. We just have to stay in the game.”

Many of us, Julia writes, “get stuck within shouting distance of [our] dreams.” And then we get mad about it and possibly become disgruntled academics instead of the artists we intended to become.

Julia advises that we (A) don’t give up on our original dreams, and (B) take baby steps to attaining them. The goal should not be fame. It should be to write a sentence. Julia calls this “filling the form.” When we take small actions, our dreams slowly fill the form like water fills a glass.

One of the tasks in week eight is to write about yourself as a color. I wrote, “I am green, the color of jealousy and of hope.”

Week Nine: Recovering a Sense of Compassion

Super interesting in this chapter: the concept of Creative U-Turns.

What is a Creative U-Turn? It’s when you almost attain a goal and then walk away from it. Or, as Julia explains, it’s when you’re used to getting your needs met by being unhappy, so you keep yourself unhappy. (Next to this, I wrote, “Whoa.”)

Why do we take Creative U-Turns? Because most of us don’t really fear failure. We fear success.

My first reaction to this concept was, No, I don’t do that. After some reflection, I realized that actually, yes I do. I have dreams of writing in new forms (TV, nonfiction), so I write drafts of pilots and essays—and then I set them aside to work on the thing I’m supposed to be good at: the novel. Novels are easy for me. Writing this nonfiction essay is less easy. But look at me! Here I am! Right now! Working through my fears! How meta!

I just flipped to the end of the book to look at Julia’s author photo. Her hand is resting on her cheek and her hair is a feathered, buoyant clump that reminds me of the show Designing Women. Even though her mouth is closed, I can hear her whispering, “You go, girl.”

I trust Julia Cameron more than I trust other people.

Week Ten: Recovering a Sense of Self-Protection

What are the toxic patterns we cling to that block our creative flow?

Julia devotes a lot of time to workaholism, which I appreciate because this is an area of opportunity for me. As evidenced by my lopsided Life Pie in week one, I tend to work at the expense of play. Incrementally, by week ten, I was getting better at playing (“Went rollerblading in Santa Monica!” I wrote in my notes), but, you know, change is a process.

In this chapter, Julia reminds us of what she suggested we write on a Post-it Note a few weeks earlier: “Treating myself like a precious object will make me strong.”

This Post-it is stuck above my desk as we speak. Every time I see it, I think, Oh yeah, I am not a soldier. I am a precious object.

Like a lot of suggestions in The Artist’s Way, this one seemed silly. And then I did it. And it was a revelation.

Week Eleven: Recovering a Sense of Autonomy

This week, we learn that there is no there there. Right when you get the thing you wanted, there is something else to want. The goal of attaining success, then, is always present, because the definition of success is always changing.

Success, according to Julia, has nothing to do with money, which strikes me as a problematically utopian point of view. “To be an artist is to risk admitting that much of what is money, property, and prestige strikes you as just a little silly.” Next to this sentence, I wrote, “Disagree.” Separating money from art is a nice idea, but because we live in the now as opposed to the hunter-gatherer era, I don’t think it’s realistic, at least not for full-time artists.

One of the tasks in week eleven is to write down the ways in which we’ve changed in recovery. I wrote, “I now categorize joy as productivity, I’ve gotten rid of things I never thought I’d part with, I feel new freedom in my work, I’m totally clear on where all my money is going, and I have a painting of my ball.”

Week Twelve: Recovering a Sense of Faith

Instead of trusting God’s will for us, Julia explains, “we have bought the message of our culture: this world is a vale of tears and we are meant to be dutiful and then die.”

Next to this, I wrote, “Holy shit, Julia.”

In this final chapter, we take another look at where spirituality meets art making. The basic memo is: You are not in control even though you very much want to be. “By trusting,” Julia writes, “we learn to trust.” I wrote this on a Post-it even though Julia didn’t tell me to, and I stuck it right next to the one about treating myself as a precious object.

At the end of the book, Julia cautions us about what may lay ahead. The Artist’s Way is about forging a new path. Often, just as we are about to excitedly set off on that new path, a Test appears. The Test, essentially, is a thing that wants to keep us stuck. Example: You decide to fire your editor, but then your editor gives you nice compliments so you don’t fire them.

Settling for good enough: Who doesn’t relate to this? A large part of my journey through The Artist’s Way consisted of me observing the elements of my life that I’d considered to be status quo and asking, Could this be better?

I didn’t expect this book to cut so deep, nor did I expect it to veer off into so many territories of my life. I didn’t expect Julia to ask me to keep a money log, or to reassess my relationships, or to collect five rocks and five leaves from outside (I forgot to mention this earlier, but wow, it was so fun). I didn’t expect her jaw-drop-inducing turns of phrase (“this world is a vale of tears”) or the revealing tidbits about her life (“recently, I bought myself a horse”). Basically, I expected not very much from Julia, and what she ended up giving me was a lot.

The Artist’s Way broadened my narrow horizons—both in terms of how I define myself as an artist and in terms of how I weave art making into my life. I’d been wanting to work in new forms anyway. After holding Julia’s hand for twelve weeks, I felt more license to do that, and less inclined to label myself as a capital-N Novelist. My day-to-day goals shifted from “work all the time” to “work most of the time but don’t forget to play with your ball.” In short, Julia put me back in touch with my inner child, which might sound kind of woo-woo to you, but if you think about it longer, it makes complete sense. What is adulthood if not the process of forgetting and then trying to remember who you were to begin with?

To begin with, I was a kid in glasses who wrote everything down because it pleased her. To begin with, Rocket Woman was possibly making yarn items.

Where is Rocket Woman now?

I don’t know, but Rocket Woman, I’m sorry for judging you. And Julia Cameron, I’m sorry for judging you too. Your way is better than my way.