I’m an artist – and I think you might be too...

This is the book that changed my life.

As a kid, I was always creative. I wanted to write books, like Jayne Fisher, who’d written the Garden Gang books for Ladybird aged nine. I wanted to sing, dance, act, woodwork (honestly). When I was thirteen, I decided writing newspaper columns would be absolutely brilliant.

When I got to university, I wrote for the student paper, and did modules in poetry and creative writing, and after graduation did an NCTJ journalism qualification before getting a job as a junior reporter. I still loved creating, but found less and less time for it. Career, navigating life’s ups and downs, and a young baby bricked up the creative flow, until it had been years since I’d attempted anything remotely creative for its own ends. Then someone lent me a book, telling me I’d love it.

The Artists’ Way by Julia Cameron.

This is the book you’ll need if you want to make something but don’t know where to start.

My copy’s cover was beige and had a vaguely winding mountain path on it. Had I not had the recommendation I wouldn’t pick it up.

The day after the recommendation, I read this article from the Guardian, again, about The Artist’s Way. In fact, just today, one of my favourite Substacks, Journalling Wild by Nelly Bryce, mentioned The Artist’s Way too. Julia Cameron would call those signs of synchronicity, the universe’s way of sending you a thumbs-up that you’re going in the right direction.

The Guardian article talks of her divorce from Martin Scorsese, her professional disappointments, and her eventual decision to encourage others to create using her methods.

Inside the pages, then, is transformation.

And this is my recommendation to you. Because I think you are an artist too. You might have more that is waiting within you.

The author seemed to know that I had all these ideas whizzing around the higher parts of my mind but was letting them go to waste. She knew that I was distracted by them, and that they were dying a slow death without anybody making them reality. I knew they were there but I wasn’t grabbing them out and making them into whatever I wanted. A painting. A photograph. A mug, painted green, that I could drink from in the mornings while I looked outside. I wanted to turn my thoughts into a poem.

She knew.

In films when situations are weird, cats start talking or the sky turns black.

(Making my own mug at a potter’s wheel. I went to Moss Studio in Altrincham).

In The Artist’s Way, Julia opens your mind and points out the things you’ve been hiding even from yourself. Reading it was like having my most secret thoughts out there on the page. You need to stop those bad-habit comforts. Those people making excessive demands on your time? They’re crazy-makers, and you’re allowing them to get to you. It’s distracting you.  

I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was just awful at dealing with it. I thought the problem was me.

Julia Cameron pointed out the obvious. These people are artists, too. They’re probably blocked, too.

Over the course of last year, I did the entire Artist’s Way. It took me more than six months to do the 12-week programme.    

With a mix of morning journalling, weekly solo artists’ dates, and searching questions, the Artist’s Way helps with what Julia calls ‘creative unblocking’.

The 12-week programme is practical, transformatively helpful, and just the littlest bit woo-woo for your average UK reader. She talks of ideas finding seeds within you, and you needing to cultivate them gently to help them grow. She talks of believing in yourself, of finding out what it is that you want to do in life and then applying yourself to it. She talks of forgiving yourself for not having done it yet.

She talks about respecting the process.

Julia Cameron doesn’t really do marketing for The Artist’s Way. She doesn’t need to. Devotees like Kerry Washington, Reese Witherspoon and Tim Ferriss provide gushing quotes for the back cover, and the message spreads by word of mouth.

My sparky little childhood self wouldn’t have dreamed that grown-up me wouldn’t be an Oscar-winning script writer, a professional singer, or run my own dance school. She would have thought everything was possible.

Perhaps it still is.   

If you enjoy The Artist’s Way, these five books might also inspire you to get going:

1.       Julia Cameron’s new book Write for Life, which came out this month

2.       Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, herself an Artist’s Way devotee

3.       Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkemann (one of those Guardian columnists I loved)

4.       A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

5.       Feel Better in 5 by Dr Rangan Chatterjee, whose podcast Feel Better Live More is full of advice.   

Next time, I’ll be talking about disappointment (but not in a bleak way).