The Magic of 'The Artist's Way'

0:01I believe that we are all creative, that we have an inner spark that we can light like an ember, and that we are able to work with this spark and foster it.

0:21Julia Cameron:I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:31Julia Cameron:Millions of people know The Artist's Way. First published in 1992, the book began as notes for a class that its author, Julia Cameron, taught on creative self-discovery, or as she sometimes prefers to call it, creative recovery. It found a huge audience, and today you can find Artists' Way groups all over the world. Cameron's original The Artist's Way offered a 12-week path towards overcoming artistic blocks. The book was subtitled A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, and it spoke of plugging into a current of what she called spiritual electricity. But her techniques were practical and easy to grasp.

1:10Julia Cameron:Rituals from The Artist's Way, such as starting your day by writing out three pages of unedited text known as doing your morning pages, have become part of the creative process of many, many artists, musicians, and writers. More than three decades after its publication, The Artist's Way continues to find new followers and even got a new bump of popularity during the 2020s. And Julia Cameron herself has returned this year with The Daily Artist's Way, offering a new way in for fans. Cameron agreed to speak to me to revisit the origins of her famous method and how she's tweaking it now in this new book.

1:47Julia Cameron:Julia Cameron, thank you for taking the time to talk to me. You're very welcome. Where am I finding you today? I live in Santa Fe. I live up the mountain from town. And I live in an adobe house. It's a courtyard. I feel like it's an appropriate spot. Yeah, well, there's some kind of creative magic to Santa Fe, isn't there? Yes. So I want to talk about The Daily Artist's Way. I have so many questions for you. I wanted to go back to the beginning because in rereading The Original Artist's Way, You talk about your origin story there and how the book and the method began as notes for a class you taught at the New York Feminist Art Institute.

2:35Julia Cameron:So I just wanted you to start by telling me about that. Well, it began as a group of notes that I passed to my friends. I thought they needed to get unblocked and maybe I could help them. I had a group of notes that I found useful. And so when I was asked to teach at the New York Feminist Art Institute, I thought, I've never heard of the New York Feminist Art Institute. That's quite an important institution in my head. It looms large. It was a space that they had on Spring Street down in Soho. I found myself teaching a small group of blocked artists. I remember one sort of flame-haired artist named Janet, who was a director who wasn't directing.

3:34And I said, well, perhaps if you tried writing morning pages, they would loosen you up a little bit. And so she was reluctant to try them, But she finally agreed, and she began writing three pages of longhand morning writing, which became known as the morning pages. Right. And she unblocked.

4:03Julia Cameron:In the original The Artist's Way, you talk about needing to break through romantic stereotypes about artists as free spirits who have to be tortured to be creative. And I know you yourself had lived quite an intense life before you wrote the book. You were a Rolling Stone reporter. You talk in your autobiography about hanging out with Hunter S. Thompson, how it was actually him who told you that maybe you should drink a little less. you talk at the start of The Artist's Way about your decision to get sober in 1978 and how that helped lead you to your creative method. You write, I learned to turn my creativity over to the only God I could believe in, the God of creativity.

4:45Julia Cameron:And that makes me think of the concept from Alcoholics Anonymous that you have to give yourself up to a higher power. This is all my way of asking you, you use the term recovering creative in the book. Why use that language? What is a recovering creative? A recovering creative is somebody who connects to a higher power for a sense of power and direction. I find myself feeling like I needed to teach people that they could connect, that there was a power. And I had a line from the poet Dylan Thomas, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. I found myself feeling like the force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives our creativity through us, that we are like prisms.

5:41and it's as if all the grace in the universe is flowing through us, shaped by us into original forms. So I think a recovering creative is someone who allows the higher power to work through them. Right.

6:03Julia Cameron:You say in the very start of the original artist's way that no God concept is necessary, but it's called a spiritual path to higher creativity. Do you find that's a block for people who aren't very spiritual to being creative? I think it's necessary for people to be open-minded. I think that they are open-minded enough to begin to experiment. And when they begin to experiment, they often find surprising results. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you are just now publishing The Daily Artist's Way. It's been three decades since the original Artist's Way. Has anything changed in that time about how you think about the problem of creativity?

6:51I think it's substantially the same. I believe that we are all creative, that we have an inner spark that we can light like an ember, and that we are able to work with this spark and foster it, nurture it, bring it along. I find that the basic tools, which are really the morning pages, the pages of longhand morning writing, artist dates, once a week solo expedition to do something that's fun or interesting to you, walks to put yourself in touch with your environment, and a sense of wonder and benevolence. and asking for guidance, which is a direct method of contacting your higher power, where you tell me what you think about X, and then you listen, and you write down what you think about X.

7:58Those tools have remained substantially the same. There is one tool in the artist's way, which if I were writing it now, I would change. Oh, really?

8:10Julia Cameron:What's that? That's a tool called reading deprivation, where you go a week without reading, and it casts you into your inner silence and casts you into thinking your own thoughts. When I wrote The Artist's Way, we didn't have the internet. We didn't have Instagram. We didn't have TikTok. We didn't spend time doing computer work. Yeah. So now if I were writing it, I would call it media deprivation. Right. And I would explain that it applies to time on the computer. I think that most people reading the book intuitively know that, but I would like to say it more directly. Well, I noticed that in the Daily Artist's Way, yeah, it mentions the words media deprivation on day 183 or something like that.

9:10Julia Cameron:Do you think that makes it harder now? Like, since there is more media, do you find that people are more blocked? They need to focus more on that media deprivation aspect? Well, I think that people have a need for media deprivation and that many times people feel glutted by the amount of inflow that they have and they have a need for a way to avoid it. And so my saying, don't do it, is powerful. So for many people, and I know for myself, the morning pages are extremely important. There's something about the magic of just writing for yourself that really shakes things loose. Where did this idea come from?

10:00Well, it's a long story. I was living in Taos, New Mexico, which is a tiny little mountain art community. And I was living at the end of a dirt road in an adobe house surrounded by cows. and I found myself feeling lonely. I had left New York behind and I had left behind a myriad of friends and obligations and there I was alone at the end of this road and I found myself thinking what I need is a witness. I need someone to talk to. I'm lonely. So I started writing morning pages as a form of connection. I wanted to feel less lonely. I wanted to feel like I had a witness to my life. And so I found myself trying the process of writing every morning before my little toddler daughter woke up.

11:07I found I could get about three pages done before she would be like, Mommy! So three pages became the established length of morning pages. And they did make me feel less lonely. They did make me feel like I had a witness to my life. I was at the time a Hollywood screenwriter, and I had written a movie for John Boyd. And his partner called me up and said, it's brilliant. And I was thrilled. Then it turned out that I couldn't get them on the phone again. I found myself thinking, maybe I could try a novel. This was a breakthrough for me. It was saying, you can write in any format. You don't need to be stuck as a Hollywood screenwriter.

12:07So I found myself writing a first novel.

12:12Julia Cameron:Through the Morning Pages, you discovered that idea, how to shift your own life through them. Yes. The Morning Pages gave me the idea. I had been writing them about 90 days, and all of a sudden one day a character came strolling into the pages and I thought, oh my God, she's not the lead in the movie. She may have something to do with the book. So that was the breakthrough for me. It's interesting you say that it was the amount of time that you had before your daughter bothered you Because you also have said that if you go more than three pages, your ego gets involved. There's a sort of philosophical reason for that length.

13:01If you go too long, it gets out of hand, right? If you go longer than three pages, you're in danger of becoming a narcissist. Right. You find yourself ruminating over things, and morning pages are intended to be scattershot. You write about anything and everything. You write about what's on your mind, what's going on in your life, and it's as if you're sending a telegram to the universe where you're saying, this is what I like, this is what I don't like. This is what I want more of. This is what I want less of. And three pages seems to be an ideal length. And I discovered that I could apply the three pages to students and say, try it.

14:01Try it for three pages. See what happens.

14:15Julia Cameron:I guess it's interesting to me because I feel like artists, you know, you want an audience and you're really shaping your expression for the public. And it really is giving yourself an excuse to do something just for yourself. I think that's an interesting aspect of the Morning Pages is that there's this component of creativity that's to get to the part where you talk to other people, you have to go through the part where you just talk to yourself. I think morning pages make us more authentically ourselves. They teach us what we really feel. And we often find ourselves saying, I didn't know I felt that way as we make a new discovery.

15:03I think that we are able to find ourselves feeling ready to communicate. Morning pages make us authentically ourselves. They connect us to ourselves, and paradoxically, they connect us to others.

15:23Julia Cameron:That's maybe the most famous element of the artist's way, but there are others and they all fit together. The other signature practice has been artist dates. This is the description from the new book. The purpose is to take yourself on a weekly adventure, one where you step outside your usual routines and immerse yourself in something that sparks your imagination. So the morning pages are like cleaning out your head and the artist's dates are like putting in new stuff that might send you in an unexpected creative direction. Was there an original inspiration for the idea of the artist Date? Well, this came from living in Taos, which was an artist community.

16:05I found that if I just wrote Morning Pages, I found myself feeling a little bit, I don't want to say stuck, but maybe a little bit over-rehearsed. and I found myself needing an outlet. And Taos had many little stores and adventures that were possible. I'm thinking now of a sculptor named Kevin Cannon who worked in leather. I used to go visit his studio just to see what magic things he was creating. that became my first artist date.

16:52Julia Cameron:How do you decide what kind of artist date to do? You have a bunch of suggestions in the book, but I mean, it should be something that is not your primary interest. It should be unexpected to you. Well, you do something that enchants or interests you. You don't want to try and make it connected to your world because that turns it into a chore. Yeah, that's what I'm getting at is that I feel like for artists, the pleasure of art is, you know, in some way a chore too, because it's part of their work. So when you take an artist's date, you do something that your inner eight-year-old would appreciate.

17:34Julia Cameron:Right. You maybe go to a children's bookstore or you go to a toy shop. The important thing is that you come away with a sense of wonder. So these two tools together have been very effective. I mean, you've really changed the lives of many, many, many, many people by introducing them to these two practices. In the new book, you already mentioned it, but there are these two new characters, walking and guidance, which have been part of the method for a long time, but now they're kind of much more center stage. How did that come to be? When did you realize that these were as important as the other two?

18:18When I wrote The Artist's Way, it's a 12-week course. And when I got to the 12th week, I said, P.S. exercise. I found myself recommending walks, and I found myself recommending that people try to have a sense of adventure. When I had been teaching 30 years, I found myself saying, actually walking and exercise is much more important than I had previously thought. So it was a discovery that I made through experimenting myself.

19:06Julia Cameron:Which is a 20-minute walk with no headphones, basically, you know, where you sort of get out of your normal space on a regular basis and reset the brain. Yeah. I was thinking there's a fun mirroring and crossover between the two old and two new techniques. The artist walks sound like they mirror the function of the artist's date in a way you're getting outside of your normal space, only actually you're really going out to be alone with your own thoughts. So it's kind of like the morning pages. As you walk, you say in the book, you'll notice that your thoughts begin to loosen up and flow more easily.

19:45Julia Cameron:And then there's this other new technique, which you call writing for guidance, which sounds a bit like morning pages in that it's writing, but it's much more directed and about looking for new inputs. And like the artist states, it's a weekly thing. You define a question for yourself and then see what answers come back, if I understand it correctly. Where did this idea come from? Well, in The Artist's Way, I talk about writing for guidance. I talk about asking for help directly. Then I went another 30 years without mentioning guidance, even though I was using it all the time. I was, I think, afraid of sounding too woo-woo if I mentioned guidance.

20:40I finally said, Julia, face it, you are woo-woo.

20:48Julia Cameron:But in a way, it's like asking yourself for guidance. You write out a question and you ask, what answers occur to me? You write through that. It's different than the morning pages in that sense. The morning pages, you're just trying to open your mind to whatever feelings you have. And guidance is like you've come to a blockage and you want to write specifically looking for that answer. Correct? That's correct. Morning pages, you are sort of emptying your mind. And you may get some guidance in morning pages, but it's seldom as direct as if you just say in guidance, what about X and ask? So the book is, I guess, technically classified as self-help, but you also talk about something that inspired me as you say, success occurs in clusters and people have formed these artist way clusters.

21:49Julia Cameron:What do you mean by that? I think it's important to say that artists thrive when they are given nurturance. Some people are lucky and they're nurtured in childhood, and they grow up knowing that they're artists, knowing that it's okay to trust their creative impulses. And then other people are never given proper mirroring. They may be a strong artist, but they may not know it. I think it comes down to having what I call believing mirrors. What's that? Believing mirrors are people who reflect back to you your strength and possibility. They never say, oh, don't you think you might need something to fall back on?

22:41And creative clusters are groups of people specifically gathered together to work through the artist's way and give each other appropriate mirroring. So your job in a creative cluster is to be a believing mirror to the other people in the cluster.

23:02Julia Cameron:I know you have strong opinions about how this should be done. And you write in the artist's way. You've seen people do it the wrong way. What are the misuses of the artist's way in these kind of groups? I think it comes down to people who are setting out to be the leader of a group. They may feel that they know what should happen with the individuals in the group. So they may be overly prescriptive. An abuse I've seen is they want to read morning pages. Morning pages are intended to be seen by yourself alone. But sometimes overly prescriptive teachers want to say, Fred, let's hear what you wrote.

23:49And it's a violation.

23:52Julia Cameron:Yeah, it has to be a kind of a balance of a supportive community, but also with enough of room for that private mental work, I guess. Yes, that's exactly right. You've written many, many books over the years that have revisited The Artist's Way, expanded it, looked at different ways in. What is The Daily Artist's Way? The Daily Artist's Way is a 366 meditations, if you will, on the process of being an artist. It starts off each page with a piece of guidance that's drawn from my many books. Then there's a quotation from what you might want to call a sage mentor, an inspirational quotation. So after that, they have what I call a writing prompt, usually questions or directives that help you to refocus your activities.

24:54So the Daily Artist's Way is rigorous.

24:59Julia Cameron:One of the things I think that people really connect with in the artist's way is that it's a process. It's not something you read, but it's a process you have to go through. From being a 12-week program, it's like three months to an entire year. Does that change the process in any way? Well, I think that you go along a day at a time. You find yourself making daily discoveries. I think that the daily discoveries are guided. They are important touchstones on the path. When you do morning pages as part of a 12-week process, you may find yourself missing certain important aspects. So I think the daily artist's way is thorough.

25:55Julia Cameron:So it's like an alternative path for people who want more ways in. I know that you're an art critic. Uh-huh, uh-huh. People sometimes ask me, Julia, aren't you afraid you're unblocking a lot of bad art? Well, I guess that is the stereotypical critic's question, isn't it? Whether this is all about making art that's good art or making art that makes you feel better and whether those goals are aligned or different or the same. I saw you mentioned people saying this to you in the back of The Artist's Way, and I did want to ask you, sometimes self-criticism is good. Aren't you afraid that you tell people to get over their self-criticism and you're unleashing a tidal wave of bad art?