At first it might sound like some sort of scam. Cameron's premise, that anyone can fulfill their artistic dreams, might seen unrealistic at best. And yet, it's surprising how often the The Artist's Way is mentioned by successful creative types these days, how often it comes up in acknowledgements and afterwords.
Considering that the The Artist's Way has been wildly successful since it's original publication in the early nineties, this isn't really too odd. Plenty of people have picked it up, completed the exercises, and in many cases moved on to bigger and better things. Fast forward fifteen years, and many of these working artists attribute their success, at least in part, to their early experiences with The Artist's Way.
The Twelve-Step Path
While a closer reading shows that the book doesn't promise any miracles, it does offer plenty of gentle advice and support, along with occasionally less than gentle reminders that, yes, the work still needs to be done before anybody can reap the rewards. Cameron makes it very clear that while reading her book is good, it isn't going to turn anybody into a famous artist overnight.
Instead, she outlines a plan: twelve weeks of readings and exercises to help the reader uncover his or her hidden (or not so hidden) creative ambitions and get to work achieving them. Central to the exercises are Cameron's two signature practices, the "morning pages" and the "artist's date."
Morning Pages: Just Start Writing
The morning pages are so simple that it's hard to come up with an excuse not to do them. The idea is to write three pages of stream-of-consciousness text upon awakening every morning, without any consideration for the value of the writing. In fact, it's not even supposed to be good, and it's never supposed to be edited or see the light of day.
This sort of attitude, that art work requires a lot of work that doesn't look or feel much like capital-a Art, is one of the major themes of The Artist's Way. Another theme is that the art may not even look or feel like work. The idea is that the aspiring artist needs to do a sort of mental spring cleaning, to remove lazy and fearful attitudes toward ambition and replace them with the belief that creative production is and should be fun.
Writing Exercises: the Secret to Success
And yes, it is fun, at least with these exercises, which run the gamut from making a collage of artistic dreams to writing angry letters to obnoxious people from the past. It's hard to make it past the first few chapters of The Artist's Way without a renewed interest in art, and, for that matter, in life. Cameron's exuberance, while occasionally cringe-inducingly new-agey, is positively contagious. And while the exercises contain some significant challenges and an unswerving insistence on self-examination, they're mostly gently reassuring, leaving the reader with a feeling that anything really is possible.
Today, with more evidence than ever before that this is true, there should be that much more reason to find an excuse to pick up a copy and just flip through it casually, without even the need to admit to any burried artistic ambitions at all. See, isn't that easy?
The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron, was published by Tarcher/Putnam in 1992, ISBN 0-87477-694-5.
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