For those who aren’t familiar with it, The Artist’s Way is a book by Julia Cameron that has been around for decades, and that a lot of folks have used successfully to get themselves unstuck when their creativity has been blocked somehow. It’s a 12-week program, with each week focusing on “recovering” a different element of creativity, and a few specific techniques maintained throughout.
I’m not writing this to criticize the book or warn anyone away from it; it’s a tool that has worked for a lot of people, and I’m all for trying tools to see whether they work for you*. But I am one of the people for whom this tool did not work, and I know others who had similar experiences, so I’ve been pondering the whys and wherefores of it for a while. I thought it might help to write them out, not just for my own personal understanding, but in case it’s useful to others who also struggled.
For a start, the spiritual/religious aspects of the book can be off-putting to some. Despite attempts to spin this as optional, discussions of God and the divine nature of the creative impulse are pervasive, arguably central to the core tenets of the process. The subtitle of the book is “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”; says it right there on the tin, so to speak. You can do some work to ignore this or scoot around it, but it is work to a certain extent. If this doesn’t bother you, it’s not a problem; if it does, you may bounce off this entirely from the beginning.
The second speed bump is one of the core techniques of The Artist’s Way: the daily pages. Every morning, you’re supposed to take a half hour to write, by hand in a notebook, three pages of something, anything, whatever you want. They don’t have to be good or make sense; they’re supposed to drain your brain of all the gunk that’s clogging your pipes, so to speak, so the creative waters can flow freely.
Unfortunately, for me, the pages drained… everything. By the time I’d finished them every day—it absolutely took me longer than a half hour to do—I was exhausted and I struggled to get my energy back. A process that was supposed to clear the old lotion from the bottle’s pump instead emptied the bottle completely.
For someone with limited time and emotional resources, being told to do a thing like this every single day? It’s incredibly demoralizing and a recipe for failure, guilt and shame. I persisted, hoping it would get easier, faster, that all my effort would be rewarded if I didn’t give up. Instead, it got worse. By the time I stopped, the only thing I was writing was the daily pages, which were mostly diaries of my own feelings of incompetence.
The first week’s goal is to recover one’s sense of safety**. The idea behind this is to find out what or who has stifled your creativity, to dig into your past and unearth the moments when you were put down or made to feel worthless, talentless, frivolous, and in doing so to free yourself from those burdens so you can feel safe to create again. Unfortunately, for me, the daily pages ended up being a big part of what was contributing to those negative emotions on an ongoing basis. They made me feel deeply insecure when they were supposed to do the opposite.
It took me weeks to quit and move on. One of the hardest things about any creative program or process is figuring out whether it’s genuinely not working for you, or whether you need to give it more time and effort. Habits can be onerous to implement. Practice makes progress, but benefits can be incremental or hard to perceive. The right way may not be the easy way, and we want easy. Why wouldn’t we? Who wants anything to be difficult?
There’s a boundary, though, where difficult becomes harmful. Instead of committing to a challenge that you’ll ultimately derive tangible benefits from, you’re hurting yourself and making things worse. To use an exercise comparison, you’re not strengthening your muscles, you’re damaging them, straining them. Recovering from that can not only put you right back where you started, it may also leave you worse off, in need of additional time and emotional energy to heal.
Again, this is not me criticizing the book so much as thinking about why it didn’t work for me. In doing so, I’m also considering alternate approaches that might be better for someone like me, and maybe someone like you, especially in these extremely trying times. I already have a few ideas! I’ll let you know what I come up with.
*Within reason. Sometimes we waste a lot of time searching for the One Tool that will solve all our problems, instead of using the tools we already have as best we can. This kind of Holy Grail quest can be self-defeating, hamster wheel spinning, yak shaving, cat waxing… whatever you want to call it.
**I’m confining myself to the notion of safety the book is addressing. I could write a whole separate essay on the many ways in which safety is an impossible goal for some people depending on a host of factors, and how artists often make art despite their circumstances, and how it frankly sucks and we shouldn’t glorify art created from pain, suffering and deprivation.
Thanks for noting all the religious/spiritual stuff in this. If it were to come to my attention as a method to try, that would kill it for me immediately. As you say, it might work great for someone else, but I would find that grating.
I imagine we’re having similar energy reserve problems for creative work but for potentially different reasons. I had heard the same advice you mention here about writing every day even if it’s trash, and I’ve wondered if that wouldn’t just make things worse. For you, it clearly did. I think what helps here (for me and others) is getting a kind of license from your experience to cut and run if we find it sucking us dry of whatever energy we do have. Lots to think about here.
Honestly, writing every day DOES work for me to a certain extent; I find that having a target word count and recording my actual word count in a spreadsheet keeps me going better than other methods, along with a few other techniques and tricks. It was writing three whole pages of random stuff before I was allowed to do anything else that drained me. I was struggling to find anything to say, rooting around in my feelings, examining my plans for the day, worrying about the world and my own life… it was so tedious and unpleasant and, as I said, utterly draining. I might even say it tended to put me in a state of anhedonia, where things I previously enjoyed were sapped of all pleasure. Definitely the opposite of the intent!
I feel you on the morning pages! I once went to a journaling workshop that recommended them, and I gave it a brief go and… it was not for me. As a staunch night owl, I feel it’s one of those exercises that’s made for early birds — or at the very least, people whose work schedule vibes with their sleep schedule.
Absolutely! It does make me wonder if, as someone on Bluesky suggested, maybe journaling for folks like us would be better at night? Exhaust our brains of all the teeming night thoughts that won’t let us sleep, right before we go to bed? Would it help us wake up fresh?