Book Review: The Artist's Way

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a rationalist, in possession of a vague understanding of Bayes’ Theorem, must be in want of some woo.

Julia Cameron’s 1992 book The Artist’s Way is mine.

The Artist’s Way is a self-help book for blocked creatives: writers, directors, painters, sculptors, actors, dancers. Let me be clear: it is a profoundly annoying book. Julia Cameron makes constant claims about God and not one of them makes any theological, moral, or metaphysical sense. I’m not sure that it has ever occurred to her that people exist who don’t have summer homes in the Hamptons, or for that matter who can’t afford to drop thousands of dollars on a creativity workshop. And the most annoying part about the Artist’s Way is that it actually works.

In this post I’m going to walk you through a handful of her tools I’ve found most useful, though if you’re a blocked creative I really recommend getting the book and working through the assignments yourself.

The Morning Pages

Time to notice if the morning pages work for you: seven days, but if it has a large negative effect keep it up for another week or two.

The morning pages are the recommendation from The Artist’s Way, and many people who don’t use the entire system still swear by (and at) them. They are deceptively simple: every morning, freewrite three pages. You can do it longhand or on the computer; I use 750 Words.

What do you write about? Anything. The morning pages aren’t supposed to have good prose; they’re supposed to be boring, repetitive, and annoying. I spend a lot of time whining about how badly I slept, freaking out about having too much work, complaining about my relationships, obsessing about people I have a crush on, and developing elaborate to-do lists even though I already have a to-do list right there in the next tab. If you can’t think of anything to write, repeat “I can’t think of anything to write” until you bore yourself into having a thought.

Writers may have a notion that they’ll use their morning pages to get a head start on their daily writing: outline your novel, perhaps, or start to draft a blog post. If that happens, great! Don’t push it. If your morning pages are stupid, petulant, irritable, and borderline incoherent, they’re still doing their job. My morning pages result in productive writing only rarely for me, and yet the morning pages are invaluable for my writing and my life.

A friend of mine, and fellow The Artist’s Way fan, said that the morning pages are fiber for your brain: it clears out all the bad stuff and blockages so that the whole system works smoothly.

A lot of people chronically push away their feelings. Sticking your feelings in a box is a useful skill: no one wants the pilot of a crashing plane to take time to process how he feels about lives being in his hands. But if you never open up the box, you can be almost arbitrarily miserable and not notice. By cutting yourself off from your feelings, you cut yourself off from your subconscious, which is what you use to create. Misery can sometimes create great art; refusing to acknowledge that you’re miserable never does.

I had some mild dissociative issues as a side effect of my mood stabilizer, and the morning pages completely cleared them up.

Conversely, people who chronically ruminate about their feelings can also benefit from the morning pages. You vomit up your obsessive thoughts onto the paper; it makes them concrete and real. When you start ruminating later in the day, you can remind yourself that you put your thoughts to paper that morning, and you can do it again tomorrow. The simple act of writing your thoughts down can make them feel resolved.

Similarly, writing down a thought often makes you realize how insane it is. As long as it’s a half-conscious impulse, you can’t argue with “all my friends hate me” or “any day now all my readers are going to realize my blog is stupid and that they should be reading dynomight instead.” Once you write it down, you look at it and go “okay, but this makes no sense.”

Even the most emotionally unaware person can notice what they’re upset about when it shows up in the morning pages day after day: I hate my job, my job is stupid, I am dreading showing up to work tomorrow, if my boss says one more word to me I will scream, I want to burn my uniform and dance around the flames, I want to burn my workplace and dance around the flames. Gee. Is your job a problem, maybe?

Of course, you can’t go out to the job tree and pluck a new job off the lowest branch. But the morning pages keep you from rationalizing to yourself that your job is okay. And as long as you’re still deluding yourself about your job, you can’t take steps to get a new one.

The same pattern applies to good things. If you see I’m so happy that I’m going to see Alice tomorrow, I can’t wait until I can hang out with Alice again, I wonder what Alice would think of this, I am still walking on air after I ran into Alice at the grocery store, perhaps you’re going to pick up the phone and call her.

Here we come to my warnings about the morning pages: when you start doing the morning pages, all the problems you’ve been ignoring come raring. You can expect a few weeks of severe disruption, as you suddenly redecorate your house, start searching for a new job, dump your boyfriend who won’t propose, answer all the emails you’ve been ignoring for six months, and take the pottery class you’ve been putting off. I recommend only beginning a morning pages practice if your next few weeks are chill.

Use the morning pages with caution if you suspect that pushing away your feelings is helpful for you right now. For example, if your parent just died, you’re in the midst of a divorce, or you just got diagnosed with cancer, mild dissociation may be what’s getting you through the day. If feeling your feelings is making your life worse, stop doing morning pages. Your usual level of dissociation should return.